Two or three years ago that faultless, endlessly-fascinating BBC programme Coast screened one of its most intriguing items. Presenter Miranda Krestovnikoff scuba-dived into the sea off the south coast to show us perhaps the English Channel’s least likely denizens – sea horses.

Most of us probably associate these delightful, delicate-looking creatures with warm waters. But there they were – gentle and charming. Just like real horses they graze on grass – a marine variety.

Small populations exist at a dozen or so sites around the British Isles, but their stronghold, where Miranda met them, is Dorset’s Studland Bay. So it will seem surprising that the Government turned down Studland Bay as one of its newly-announced Marine Conservation Zones. And the surprise will become a shock on learning that, coincidentally, research by Cardiff and Swansea Universities has shown that every sea-horse colony is facing one or more of a range of threats – pollution, trawling, dredging, sailing.

But the bay’s exclusion points up just how weak this much-vaunted conservation measure is. The bay is popular for yachting – and power-boating. And Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, responsible for the conservation zones, names possible impact on “recreational boating activities” as a reason for rejecting the bay.

So commercial interests have trumped conservation in this precious but vulnerable marine habitat. Presumably those granted Conservation Zone status, 23 in all, including five along, or off, the coasts of the North-East and Yorkshire, will fare better?

You’d be unwise to bet on it. For behind the hype, the blunt fact is that designation does not bestow any special power of protection. Issues will be dealt with on an ad-hoc basis by the various parties who would have been involved anyway. Apart from an expectation that a threatened area’s status as a Marine Conservation Zone will be taken into account, nothing has changed.

The Tories have thus made a gesture towards conservation without providing the means to ensure it works. They detest regulation, which they brand as red tape. Under unbroken Tory rule we’d never have had town and country planning, protecting the countryside. Or the Factories Acts, saving lives.

IF Coast is one example of enduring excellence from the BBC so too are its adaptations of classic fiction. In my opinion the very best of that distinguished line was The Barchester Chronicles, adapted in 1982 by Alan Plater. Filmed in and around the close of Salisbury Cathedral, it looked good, was true to Anthony Trollope’s novels and, not least, it introduced most of us to Alan Rickman.

A virtual newcomer among a host of well-established names, including Nigel Hawthorne, and Geraldine McEwan, Rickman, who died last week, virtually stole the show as the slimy, scheming chaplain Obadiah Slope. Well actually he didn’t, for the cast was uniformly superb. Even so, Rickman’s Slope held centre stage. Yet as he said: “I was nobody.” After that he was the actor to go to for sneering villainy, but it is his oleaginous Slope that I will always cherish.