Dishing the dirt

WHEN CHANNEL 4 started up, people in Keighley, West Yorkshire, couldn't get it.

I don't know if it was something to do with us being in a valley or whether someone powerful at Channel 4 once had a really bad time there so he decided to punish us, but the fact was we had BBC 1 and 2 and ITV and where Channel 4 was supposed to be there was just grey fuzz.

My mate, Bob, who lived out of town in the moor-top village of Oxenhope, could get a picture, but with a layer of fuzz.

It was better than nowt. We used to watch music shows as if they were animated Impressionist paintings.

How cheated we felt, denied this one great opportunity to watch Richard Whiteley on Countdown.

When Bruce Springsteen sang 57 Channels (And Nothin' On), we laughed. If only we knew. Now we've got a satellite dish on the garden wall and it attracts, like a meshy magnet, a whole host of TV stations we never even knew we wanted to watch.

There are still the two BBCs, ITV and Channel 4 and Five, which we couldn't get before the dish.

Then there are three Sky channels. We can get the third only on Freeview, which is just as well because all it has is Street Wars – about a cop tactical unit – and Mile High, a lurid soap about the sexual shenanigans of a bunch of flight attendants.

If I wanted to see that, I'd visit the video sections of charity shops and hunt out Confessions of an Air Hostess.

Then there are BBCs 3 and 4, which seem designed for people who, by some strange quirk in the space-time continuum, live their lives an hour later than the rest of the world.

ITV's 2, 3 and 4 show a mix of the very antiquated – The Saint, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Minder – the very mediocre – Heartbeat, Poirot, Goodnight Sweetheart, the very daytime – Montel Williams, Judge Judy – and a few films you have seen 17 times before, starring Richard Gere or George Clooney – Primal Fear, Out of Sight.

So it's safe to say the station bigwigs are obviously after one very specific target: 50-year-old housewives who love Dennis Waterman, Nick Berry and the domestic problems of Americans.

Do they exist anymore?

Never mind, because next up there's S4C, the Welsh-language channel, just right for housewives missing the valleys. Then there is a whole mess of weirdness. Channel 4+1, E4, E4+1 and More4 and More4+1, all of which seem to star either Edith Bowman or Fearne Cotton, trendy bands you've never heard of and American series that you never want to see – except The Simpsons. And then they seem to show only a rotation of 10 episodes. There's nearly 20 years' worth to dip into, for gawd's sake.

There are the four Zone channels, the best of which is Romantica, which plays endless Ali McBeal reruns and mawkish 80s candyfloss such as Chicago Hope and Beauty and the Beast (starring Guernsey's very own Roy Dotrice).

Film 24 shows films so old that even your gran and granddad would've missed them in the cinema in 1942, because they'd be snogging, or in an Anderson shelter sharing a Woodbine.

Then, similar to the Zone family, a couple of doors away there's the Fives.

This is soap central – Dawson's Creek, Neighbours, Home and Away and, if you're lucky, late at night, at some godforsaken hour, a film with Patrick Swayze as a bounty hunter in tight trousers and rolled-up shirt-sleeves.

Men and Motors is for Kevs who are off the road and want to re-enact the cop-car chase that brought them their suspension, (but from a helicopter's viewpoint) and Red has medium shows and reruns of creaky, 30-year-old, daytime's Crown Court that always seems to feature a 'young' Richard 'I don't believe it' Wilson as a perjurer.

If you hate films over three minutes long, then Propeller is the station for you. Amateur makers 'from the UK and beyond' gather here to show their best shorts. Great fun on Christmas Day when the Twiglets and Babycham have run out,

Nuts TV is for men who buy the 'lads' mag' of the same name and features boxing, cars, semi-naked alfresco Belgian couples and cars again. Channel M is for people in Manchester and, rather like its red, white and black football team, which has fans all over the world, it seems to think that the rest of us are dying to know what's going on in its city too. We really aren't.

If you can't afford that frock or tank top today, don't despair, with Fashion TV you can spend hours aboard a luxury yacht and watch pipe-cleaner models shuffle around to bad music and drink cocktails with their vacant boyfriends and extravagantly dressed gay men.

Now, doesn't that more than make up for it?

Sliding into the cine section, Film4 shows every single Sean Bean movie ever made and, in previews, ones he is about to make (and I imagine, if Film4+Retro ever starts up, films he could have made but never did).

Zone Horror is for lads in glasses who kill frogs for a laugh and Movies4Men does what it says on the tin, though I wonder what men really get out of a film called Bikini Drive-In II.

Talking of which, apparently there are some even more salacious channels hidden in the depths of the satellite dish with names like Double D TV, featuring women who look like living Bratz dolls shaking things on the screen.

Perfect background television for when the vicar and his wife come round for supper.

Elsewhere there are channels for brides, horse lovers, wine buffs, makeover freaks, food nutters and travel junkies. There's a true story movie channel about kidnapped heiresses and kids falling down wells, a baby channel, a pub channel, a channel for owners of Audis and even a channel that shows luxury goods to people who can't afford them.

I long for the days of the three channels ('Check Rentals, Check Rentals, Check Rentals, the best TVs for you, oi!').

You didn't have to decide between the pretty good, the mediocre and the downright rubbish. It was either, 'No, no, ah yeah' or you turned it off.

But that's the lure of the one-eyed god. While there's a blank screen in the corner of the room, you will always think that there's something worth watching, if only you had switched it on.

Give it the heave-ho, join the library and read loads of books instead. Your pub conversation will improve.

'Did you start reading that 19th-century psychological love story between two ill-starred lovers called Cathy and Heathcliff last night?

'It was brilliant.'