I'm the one who runs out of the kitchen saying, "I just have to catch the weather, " because at least you get informative pictures with the weather forecast. I'm an RTE girl myself, as far as the weather is concerned . . .

and of course there is Francis on Sky, the man who has made the weather an art . . . but even I know that on TG4, the weather forecast is not just informative.

I would hazard that on TG4 you have the only audience for a weather forecast which is significantly weighted towards the male population. Very significantly weighted, as a matter of fact. The TG4 weather girls have done more for the first national language than anyone since Douglas Hyde.

I would very much like to witness the interviews for those jobs. I realise that a lot of people would also like to witness those interviews, and I seem to know quite a few of them, but I would actually bring a notebook with me and write things down.

When the TG4 weather girls turn to the coast of Connemara, wearing those ruched tops, a devoted section of the male population holds its breath and prays for rain. There are quite a lot of men now who only have two words of Irish and those two words are "Aimsir Laithreach". God bless them, by speaking Irish, those weather girls are not so much building the nation as saving the station. It will be interesting to see if the TG4 weather forecast manages to maintain its position in the ratings after such a potentially catastrophic stretch of predictable weather. I mean, it's January, it's cold, what can they say? Who cares, no one can understand them anyway.

The TG4 girls are a good reason to love television. I'm on television this week (on Tuesday, in a jacket) and it does make you think about the telly in a vain, neurotic and highly confused way (no change there then).

Obviously I would resolve to give up watching television . . . the time vampire, Kenneth Anger calls it . . . but I have to watch TV for my job. Research, you know. I would lose all credibility in the boardroom if I hadn't seen the latest episode of South Park, and the infomercials for that miracle face powder, and US chat shows which show old interviews with people I've never heard of.

That's real reality television . . . the sort that we actually watch. Posh telly is always more difficult, and not just because they kept on showing Bleak House at different times and on different days, and then the omnibus edition was always on at different times each Sunday, so that you felt quite inadequate before you'd even seen the damn programme. Sure that's the Brits for you.

Thank God it's finished.

But this is all just a complicated way of admitting that I know everything about Celebrity Big Brother. If you want to know anything about it, just ask me. I know that Michael Barrymore has two dogs, called JD (for Jack Daniels) and Sprite. I know George Galloway's charity of choice is something called InterPal (so not a great name). I know that former basketball star and cross dresser Dennis Rodman is six foot six.

And I know all this, not because I have watched Celebrity Big Brother, but because I read the newspapers . . . sometimes. People who fear social ostracism if they give up watching TV should take heart. John Waters has written about growing up in a house with no television and how he would go in to school the next day and just pick up what had been on the night before. Within minutes he was chatting in a knowing way about shows he had never seen. Television enters our minds in unknown ways. The TG4 girls are in the ether. Little Britain is in the language. So, do you have to watch television to see television? Computer says no.