You have been watching

Travel to the Far East, wander the streets of any busy city and pretty soon you’ll see your first badly translated T shirt logo – probably something along the lines of ‘hey sexy boy, you top hunky’. As you try to figure out what message the author / designer was trying to put across, your first thought is either you’re in the wrong part of town (and where can you get a taxi, sharpish) or how some cultures are like oil and water – mix them up and you get an opaque mess that neither understands.

And so it is with French TV - stick to home produced shows and it’s fine. As in the States and UK, kids programming is rammed with cartoons and low key quiz formats, but with a lot fewer adverts than there could be - and a delightfully old fashioned daily guide as to how your little darlings should be attired, depending on the time of year. News & current affairs bulletins – stuck in peculiar quarter to the hour slots - are hosted by the usual him & her duo’s (but being French, much better looking than their British counterparts). There’s the usual (but francocentric) international / national coverage, invariably followed by a piece about a pig farmer (just before the weather, itself fronted by an improbably leggy blond). And, most evenings, a really long film – probably something about four generations of the same family going on a picnic. Absolutely nothing happens except a chaste kiss between one of the daughters and a boy from the farm nearby and, though it should be as engaging as watching paint dry, it’s actually rather sweet.

Where it all goes horribly wrong is when the networks rely upon seriously dated American imports to cheaply fill the schedules. Stuff that wouldn’t get near UK based channels is dubbed and then thrust upon the populace, and I’m not sure that anyone actually watches it anyway (other than on the screen in the bar, when the owner gets bored of the MTV channel his teenage daughter put on earlier that day).

And there’s a French version of ‘Take it or Leave it’ too – which at least has the benefit of not being fronted by Noel Edmonds. Which is a good thing.