In the spring of '48, Mao Tse-tung got quite irate

American Television, where do you start? Its another one those dichotomies. One one hand some American TV is the best TV you will ever see (for example Mad Men, The Sopranos, yes even the Wire). They do cop shows better than anyone else (NCIS, CSI, Bones the list goes on). The animated series' (The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, South Park) are some of the funniest, most cutting satire around. And yet some of it some of the direst drivel you will ever see - daytime TV is full of chat shows, soap operas, judge shows, tabloid talk shows.

We only have the most basic cable package (you can't get TV through a normal ariel anymore as far as I can tell) which gives us NBC, ABC (x 2 New Hampshire's and Boston's), CBS, Fox, three PBS channels (I'll come back to them), a god bothering channel, a shopping channel and a Spanish language channel (which is the only one that I can watch s***** on, I never thought I would care about the Mexican 1st division but there you go). So we don't have the hundreds of channels because quite frankly there are too many channels with too much choice for too much money.

There is a better way - we don't have AMC the channel that shows Mad Men. However there is a way round this, buy it from iTunes. Okay it cost 35 bucks but we get it the morning after its shown. $35 is a lot cheaper than having to subscribe to AMC (and I'm sure that there is nothing else on the channel that would be of interest anyway).

Tonight was the start of the new season of shows on all the channels. It goes on all week, on all the channels. Tonight we had the Event on NBC, followed by the remake of Hawaii Five-0 on CBS. The Event? Not sure about it but will try it again next week. And Hawaii Five-0? Refer to the comment above on cop shows. No Jack Lord though (but he is dead so....). Of course the other thing about all the channels is the adverts - oh the adverts, the interminable adverts. They are worth a post on their own. So I will talk about them another time.

But if you tire of all this, what to do? Then turn to PBS. The Public Broadcasting Service, the nearest you will get to the BBC in America (unless of course you have a subscription to BBC America but we don't). There are no adverts, sort of. Not in the programmes but before and after the programmes you are told who has "supported" the programmes (they look like adverts to me but there you go). We are lucky enough to have WGBH as our local PBS channel, the premier PBS channel and they make stuff as good as the BBC. They also have a lot of stuff from the BBC (even if some of it is Keeping Up Appearances, ahem). It has proper news on it too which talks about things outside the state, let alone the country.

But better than all of this is the radio equivalent of PBS, NPR. That sounds so like the BBC because a lot of the time it is. Every night when I go to bed, I get to listen to the World Service. being broadcast on our local NPR station. If they had Sailing By and the shipping forecast, it would be like being at home....