If you want to know how the BBC wastes the money we provide it with, what follows may be of interest.
Five or so years ago, the BBC, then in the control of Lord Birt, Blair's 'blue skies' thinker, filmed a series of what are known as idents, those little bits of film between the programmes that are supposed to remind you which channel you are watching.
These idents featured a huge, red balloon floating slowly over various well-known British beauty spots like St Michael's Mount or the Needles. The cost of making the films, which could just as well have been faked on a computer, was put at £5 million.
In 2001, Lorraine Heggessey, the new head of BBC1, decided to scrap the idents. 'The balloon to me,' she said, 'feels very slow. It goes across the majestic landscape but doesn't feel in touch with the viewers.'
The balloon was eventually replaced, at a cost of £700,000, with a number of surreal scenes, all featuring men and women dressed in red and black - some tangoing in the rain, others precariously balanced on seaside rocks, apparently performing t'ai chi exercises.
These were designed, according to a BBC spokesman, 'to put the channel firmly in touch with contemporary life'.
Not long afterwards, Lorraine Heggessey left the BBC to be replaced by a man called Peter Fincham. And Fincham has now let it be known that the days of the red-cloaked t'ai chi weirdos are numbered.
Who or what will now replace them? Who cares? Only one thing is certain: a very large sum of money will be spent to provide something new which we could all quite easily live without, something which, you can be sure, will be scrapped after a year or so.
Punters beware
With speculation and predictions about the best man to lead the Conservative party, it is interesting to go back to the dark days of 2001 following the electoral defeat and resignation of William Hague when, then as now, Ken Clarke was a contender.
It is generally agreed that the successful candidate in that election, Iain Duncan Smith (almost totally unknown at the time), was a failure as leader, possibly the most hopeless to head one of our major political parties.
Now that he has returned to the obscurity whence he so unexpectedly emerged, it is rather extraordinary to be reminded of the amount of support he enjoyed from the press at the time.
The Daily Telegraph, the paper probably favoured by most Tory voters, described Ken Clarke as 'the candidate of the past', Duncan Smith was 'the candidate of the future' and the Tory membership should vote for the future, the Telegraph advised. The Sunday Telegraph echoed that assessment, claiming that Duncan Smith would present the Conservatives as a 'civilised and intelligent movement'.
The Sunday Times said much the same, predicting that Duncan Smith, not Clarke, would lead the Tories to eventual victory. The Times was slightly less enthusiastic but still opted for Duncan Smith in preference to Clarke. Its stablemate, the Sun, however, had no reservations. The Tories, it said, 'have to keep themselves alive and that means electing Iain Duncan Smith, who, unlike Kenneth Clarke, is actually a Tory'.
The moral is that if the Tory membership is still given a say in electing its next leader, it should perhaps think twice about taking seriously the advice of such ill-informed and out-of-touch tipsters as these.
A futile pursuit
Until the other day, I had been ignorant of the existence of something called the Adjudication Panel for England. And the same goes for the Standards Board for England. Yet, according to press reports, the Adjudication Panel has the power to ban London mayor Ken Livingstone from holding public office for five years.
Livingstone was elected by a large majority of London voters. In contrast, the Adjudication Panel, described as independent, consists of a group of people appointed by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, a friend of the PM.
The existence of this independent panel has been highlighted as a result of a trivial incident involving Livingstone which most people will have forgotten about. Last February, at one of his lavish gay and lesbian celebrations, Red Ken was rude to a Jewish journalist, Oliver Finegold from London's Evening Standard, likening him to a concentration camp guard.
Most hacks would have thought little of being insulted by Red Ken. Some might even have insulted him back. Mr Finegold, however, backed by his editor, demanded a public apology and when this was refused, his case was taken up by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, another unelected body which claims to speak on behalf of all the Jews in Britain.
The board, which thinks nothing of branding journalists as racists and anti-semites if they write disrespectfully of Mr Sharon, announced that Livingstone's refusal to apologise had 'compounded this insult to the victims of the Holocaust'.
Instead of being dismissed as an obvious bit of nonsense, its complaint is apparently taken so seriously that it has been referred to the Standards Board which, in turn, has referred it to the Adjudication Panel. A lengthy hearing is due to take place come December.
At a time when Londoners are under threat from terrorists, it might occur to some of these people that the mayor has slightly more important things to worry about.