Having spent an hour on the phone with my good friend Manu last night – establishing that my modem is crocked after only two months’ use – I was thrilled to have to waste another hour on the phone this morning with my ADSL provider before they would accept this and agree to send me another. It will be at least 5 days before I get a replacement so there may well be reduced service this week.

For today, I will confine myself to giving you one critic’s views of the Ana Obregon program I mentioned a couple of days ago. This was a failure, by the way, achieving much lower audience figures than expected. But I will return to this theme tomorrow. . .

This program is so bad I can well believe Ana Obregon wrote the script herself. What a lot of stupidities and pedantries and what rancid, hackneyed humour. The series is an insult to the sex which she claims to set herself up to protect and, in the end, offers an aberrant simplification of the relationships between partners, with an argument which is coarse, banal, empty, backward, unfair, lamentable, puerile, naïve, insulting, poor, atrocious, weak. . . I could go on reciting a string of disdainful adjectives covering more than two pages, so ready am I to completely ridicule such rubbish. But it’s not my intention to bore you, dear reader.

This new series at times recalls, unhappily, the ill-fated ‘Ana y los siete’ and gives an excessive response both to the incomprehensible interest of ‘la fantastica’ in frequently appearing semi-naked and to her unforgivable need to have everyone constantly telling here how marvellous she is. What have we done to deserve this Calvary? What sins have we committed? Do we Spanish really deserve such punishment however stupid we are? Probably yes, for according to Gustavo Bueno “You get the TV you deserve”. Amen to that.