But I've harboured a deep suspicion of the Word of Mouth audience ever since the time, a couple of years back, that they voted Enoch Powell the best living speaker of English, spellbound by his rigid adherence to grammatical rules and completely ignoring the dirgey monotone in which his thoughts are embodied. I'm not encouraged by the fact that an inadvertent "shit" from Anna Ford on Today can practically jam the BBC switchboard and make headlines in the press. I suppose these people deserve our sympathy as much as our condemnation: to set such store by artificially constructed rules of language is odd, to say the least, and it suggests that what is going on is a powerful sublimation of other anxieties - about class and social change, mainly. It would be worth knowing whether the BBC gets more complaints about language at times of political uncertainty.But it's surely not right to pander to these fears by inviting contributions to "The People's Lexicon". This is a list of approved and reviled tropes to be nominated by listeners - in effect, a kind of linguistic "Readers' Wives" page. And though it was a joy to hear Frank Delaney on the air again, after a long absence through illness, it would have been nicer if he hadn't been putting up a daft defence of the subjunctive, on the grounds that it is a mood that offers a sense of possibility unattainable with the plain old indicative.

The implication seemed to be that the 98 per cent of the English-speaking world who wouldn't know a subjunctive were it (note the construction) to tap them on the shoulder and ask them the time must lack imagination.More sublimated social anxieties in Ip Dip Doo (Radio 2, Wednesday), in which Georgina Boyes confronted the myth that the modern child has abandoned old-fashioned playground games in favour of computer games. In fact, the programme demonstrated that children's games are remarkable for their longevity - the most telling example being a clapping game which amalgamated a popular song of the 1940s with the old favourite "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man's snoring": this must have been passed down through at least 10 generations of primary school children. Boyes suggested that this is the equivalent of an adult folk-song surviving since the early 18th century.Of course, folk-songs don't survive this long, largely because they are sung by people with irritating nasal voices; and a promising programme was ruined by the inclusion of several examples of this. These have roughly the effect on me that split infinitives have on other people, but don't run away with the idea that this is some sort of sublimation. Sometimes hatred can be pure.The news that Martin Bell's series "The Truth Is Our Currency" was being postponed came too late to stop it being reviewed here last week. Apologies for any confusion; and snooks cocked at the BBC for withdrawing a programme about bias in the news at the very moment when the issue most demands consideration.. Which of these quiz shows offers the most depressing proof that Pearson TV had no right to be let anywhere near the last terrestrial wavelength? Is it (a) 100 % (C5, every weekday); (b) Whittle (C5, every weekday); (c) Tibs and Fibs (C5, Wed); or (d) Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment (C5, Thur)? Answer: all of the above.

Channel 5 has been working hard all week to tell jokes against itself before anyone else can. "Everything to play for," said our host Tony Slattery at the end of Tibs and Fibs, a dismally smutty medical quiz show. "In fact, nothing to play for, because of the budget." 100% even makes a virtue of the precarious state of the channel's finances, dispensing with the services (and salary) of a host altogether. Which gives it slightly more personality than Whittle, hosted by Tim Vine. Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment enshrines another joke against the channel in a programme title, as the head of light entertainment basically heads the whole channel. You can ignore the inaugural night, which misleadingly suggested that there is a budget for drama. Even if there were, the rigid scheduling structure that is the channel's unique selling point would find no place for Beyond Fear (Sun) on a normal night. Otherwise the movie would have to go, or the gardening game show, the travel show, the property show and all the other criminally unimaginative magazine formats that on any other terrestrial channel would run, out of harm's way, in mid- afternoon.The exclamation mark at the end of Hospital! (Sun) announced a debt to the school of surreal slapstick patented by the Airplane! people.

So where does this leave Exclusive! (every weekday)? Rather than signalling even the merest iota of irony, the punctuation in this case betrays a fierce desperation to be noticed. In a luckier life, its host Julia Bradbury would have a sporting chance of finding an audience. But Exclusive! strands her on a deserted set and forces her to hand out miserly gobbets of second- hand showbiz tittle-tattle. Still, it's better than Turnstyle (Sun), a sports report show that suffers from the fact that Channel 5 has access to almost no significant sporting events. For its first outing it was reduced to interviewing football fans out on location, and then in the studio, because the good thing about football fans is that you don't have to pay them.Into this sea of mediocrity comes the clunkily titled Five News Including First on Five (every weekday).

The programme's editor, we read, has warned his staff that they will get a bad reception, which has a nice symmetry to it, given that the viewers are getting bad reception too. The one thing you can say about Five News is that money has visibly been spent. Most of Channel 5's programmes limp so badly that they are beneath spoof, but here, at least, an effort has been made to create a style, albeit one that by some freakish reordering of the rota has already been spoofed by The Day Today and Brass Eye.It's a depressing indictment of our national mindset that Kirsty Young, because beautiful and blonde, has been prejudged as intellectually incapable. She has perhaps overcompensated, stripping away whatever charm she may possess to buttonhole the camera like someone with no sense of humour who wants to talk politics at a party. The other saving grace of Channel 5 is The Jack Docherty Show (Sun, and every weekday). Viewers may have trouble downsizing their expectations for a show that can't be an event every night, or even any night, but Docherty has hit the track at pace and looks weirdly close to being a natural.The in-joke on his show came in an item called "The Re-Tuners", a reference to the fact that by a random stroke of good luck half the nation has been deprived of adequate reception to Channel 5's squalid float-past of derivative junk. The mood of your reviewer improved perceptibly on about Tuesday evening, when his slightly wavy picture suddenly blew up into a snowstorm.