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I'm sure Crimewatch never used to be quite like this, it's like Our Tune with pictures.

Remember Our Tune? I'm pretty sure it traumatised me as a child. We'd go to do the big supermarket shop; Mum, Dad, our kid and I, and of course, we'd learnt fairly sharpish that this was a family activity that went much smoother if the children just stayed in the car and listened to the radio while the parents went in to choose between luncheon meat and tongue for the next week's packed lunches. They may have returned four times out of ten to find one of us in tears and the other protesting complete innocence and ignorance as to how that came about, and why there was a toy car shaped bruise quickly forming on the tearful one's forehead, but at least they didn't have to drag us screaming along the soup aisle wondering at what point the surrounding shoppers would judge it acceptable for them to start throwing tins at us. I don't know why we couldn't just have been good quiet kids, I really don't, though I think having PSPs might have helped.

Our Tune!

The few minutes of calming strings that Radio 1 would deliver into the car to underpin the soft sincerity of Simon Bates' voice as he recounted a tale; a tale of love, of people coming together, complete happiness in their grasp, excitedly making plans for the future, truly beginning to discover the real beauty of life, stepping into a fairy tale ending. Then in the same gentle tones, but now with a merciless chill, one of them would die. Every single time.

That's got to be pretty damaging to an impressionable young kid, I've never considered this before, but it now seems obvious to me that Mr Bates is entirely responsible for my mis-shaped approach to those relationship things, for the fact I'm 31 and not a single lady has tried to put a ring on it, for my inability to fully enjoy rom coms.

Simon Bates is responsible for the fact I can't enjoy Love Actually, and I'm going to sue him for it.

Anyway, Crimewatch, I'm not sure it needs to be quite this emotive, I mean, I'm quite sure there'll be some folk in the country who sorrowfully watch the short story of the young girl attacked in her own home by a man claiming to have come to fix the boiler, and who, when recognising the photo-fit at the end as 'that boy who works at the bookies', will be moved to pick up the phone and, in playground vernacular, dob him in. I'm more sure however, that there will be some folk who watch the disturbing tale with a little more disgust, perhaps even anger, and head straight down to the bookies to duff him up, or perhaps even more likely, round to the actors house to give him a good hiding instead, because people are stupid.

I think they'd be much better emailing the nation each day with a picture of an offender and a note declaring that 'This geezer's got the last Rolo, tell us where he is and it's yours.', no vigilante justice, no mistaken identity, just hundreds of fatties sniffing the air for a whiff of chocolate coated caramel.

Oh, right, yeah. I bumped into Riyaz, said thanks. I think I'd left it a few days too long.