EVEN without jungle fever, the commercial channels are clogged with celebs telling us how to live, cook, clean, eat, holiday, lose weight and, once more, how to drive.

Learner Drivers (ITV1, Friday) is listed as a new series. "That's absolute rubbish, it's a straight-forward rip-off of BBC's Driving School. I don't care if you've got a preview tape, I'm not watching it," raged my co-driver in life.

Fortunately, if you have Bruce Forsyth's Didn't They Do Well! (BBC1, Thursday) for competition it's not difficult to offer an alternative.

Soon my wife was watching wide-eyed as 33-year-old Angela Meah from Birmingham reduced husband Moh to hysterical laughter by failing to make a single gear change without turning the car into a Skippy impersonator.

Angela had failed two tests and had so many driving lessons that her instructor advised her to take the bus.

Seeing the hilarity spread to our living room, my wife quite rightly defended Angela's ashes and demanded to know what was wrong with her driving.

Mind you, this comes from a driver who, currently, won't park in the same row as any other vehicle.

By this time Moh had run away from the car and Angela was threatening "no bed-sharing tonight". The trouble here is that without the smug satisfaction of a driving instructor's dual control car the other half of a hapless driver is tempted to grab the wheel, shout warnings, cover their eyes or scrabble pathetically at any secure part of the car.

Let's face it, only reality TV subjects and instructors have any incentive to endure a wing mirror being clouted off and the dreaded insurance hassle to follow.

Back on the Beeb, if you were caught keying the name amplebosom.com on the internet you might quite rightly expect a clip around the ear from your partner.

However, it's the name of the dotcom bra company started by North Yorkshire farmer's wife Sally Robinson and was featured as one of the success stories in Dotcoms Bounce Back (BBC2, Wednesday).

Sally is currently in negotiation concerning the film rights to her story and Dawn French and Victoria Wood are being considered to play the role of one of life's larger ladies.

She now has 12 staff and is... expanding. The saddest story was petspark which lost millions and went the same way as US investor pets.com while search engine Google is worth mega-bucks because it's a free service which only charges sponsors when users visit an advertiser listed on the right hand side of a page. "That's good," said my youngest, "I never click on them."

Such gritty reality means that the latest US import 10-8 quietly debuted on cable/satellite channel Granada Plus alongside re-runs of Murder She Wrote and Columbo.

The title 10-8 is taken from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department radio code for "in service and ready to respond".

Star of the show is Ghostbusters actor Ernie Hudson, now 57, who is a Clint Eastwood-style deputy trying to show new guy Rico (Danny Nucci) the ropes.

"This looks so old I can't believe it was only made last year," said my wife, who would replace every second of Learner Drivers with 10-8.

Published: 07/02/2004