Television review

Dear Tom,

I feel so embarrassed to bring you my little problem, but I just don't know where to turn. I work as an agony columnist for Sky magazine (fingers crossed!) and was recently asked to take part in a Modern Times (BBC2) documentary about my job.

The director and crew were very nice and put me at my ease but I'm afraid that I may have been a little too unbuttoned as a result. You know how it is, I'm sure - one thing led to another and before I knew it I was insulting my readers and revealing absolutely everything - how I show the letters to friends for a laugh, how I think that it's the lowest form of journalism around, how it's all about money and has nothing to do with helping people.

You have to believe that usually I'm not that sort of girl at all! What makes it worse is that they cut my contributions together with lots of sequences in which perfectly decent people said how much replies to their letters had helped them, and that most of the other agony aunts came across as rather serious and concerned. Some of them had done counselling courses and had offices full of helpsheets about Erection Problems and Internet Affairs, and they even had a sequence in which a badly abused woman who was imprisoned in her house rang the This Morning agony slot for help, live on air! Well, you can imagine how that made me look. I feel so cheap and I just don't know what my boss is going to say - I even said the job was "money for old rope" at one point and I'm worried that he may want to cut my salary. What can I do?

Karen Krizanovich (address withheld)

Dear Karen,

Having seen the programme you refer to I can't help but agree that you were unwise to be quite so candid. Much of what you said was absolutely true, of course, but, still - I think your colleagues had been reflecting on that wise old saying "least said, soonest mended" and the name Gerald Ratner did come to mind when you described agony aunts as "modern day snake oil salesmen".

How ironic that the film should have included a sequence from daytime television entitled "I wish I'd never said that".

Still, I really think you should try and put this behind you now - for one thing there's no use in crying over spilt milk, even if you have spilt it in your editor's lap! Secondly you must try and get the film in perspective - it's true that the sequence in which you were shown dispensing advice while driving in your boyfriend's sports car did suggest a rather flippant approach to other people's misery, but I think most viewers will have been able to see that the director had something of a weakness for gimmicky image-making.

I don't know about you, but it seemed a tiny bit tacky to present the story about the prisoner as a photo-romance. All the same I think it might be sensible for you to look for another line of work in the caring services, something more suited to your personality. I understand that there is always considerable demand for domination, and apparently it needn't involve anything yucky these days. I enclose a few leaflets from a nearby phone box which may put you in touch with the right people. Very best of luck for the future - I really hope things turn out well for you.

Yours Sincerely,

Tom

In The Mission (BBC1) Robert Thirkell followed the process of destroying a thirty storey building with controlled explosions. On Sky TV they show this sort of thing all the time, though they only take 15 seconds to do it. The Mission's more contemplative version initially described the process as "incredibly dangerous" but later downgraded it to only "potentially dangerous" - which is true about almost any job in the world (including that of TV critic, if your subjects know where you live). The script was a bit over-excited but for connoisseurs of destruction this was a treat anyway - a crash course in how to turn 30 stories of steel and concrete into a kind of liquid, one that will spill just precisely where you want it.