This is one case where the demands of politics could be more voracious than those of the market. The days have been gone for many years when both the BBC and ITN could count on a captive audience for the Nine O'Clock News and News at Ten. But until the coming of digital, this was concealed by the relative failure of satellite and cable to take hold in Britain as they have in the United States.There are several reasons for this difference. What effect will it have on the style and quality of British television news? For paradoxical reasons, it may be the BBC, not its frankly commercial competitors, which will need to go down market in the search for bigger audiences. BBC news producers resent the suggestion that they are "dumbing down".

Unfortunately, most of the time Jean-Pierre and Rosemary connected in stilted Franglais. Plowright had speak lines like "if you are in trouble, dis-moi la verite." And la verite is that there is no chambre for stuff comme ca.. A t long last, with the arrival of digital television a real multi- channel environment will be upon us. While Rosemary fantasised about an irrecoverable past, Jean-Pierre dreamed of an instant future embodied in Disney's Space Mountain.

A shot of Jean-Pierre in a hotel bubble bath deftly re-routed the tantalising convention of the discreetly naked actress, reminding you that this was a tale of people either yet to enter or long since exited from the sexual arena.A scene in which Tutin and Wilton talked to each other when a third party pressed a mobile phone to an intercom subtly underpinned the moral: that people should only connect. In place of originality, This Could Be The Last Time assembled familiar elements from a grab-bag of sources. The standard-issue exploration at an old woman's dread or senility was bolted on to an Anglo abroad plot, which was then filtered through the sort of improbable friendship with a child that old people in films strike up when they need to recover some jeu d'esprit. The boy in question, Jean-Pierre, was on the run with stolen drug money, which meant that the odd couple were key players in a missing persons drama.