UNFORTUNATELY, I missed the opening moments of Home, the first of six programmes about our changing domestic cooking habits, as I was ordering an Indian from Bu Ali.

Montrose knows it can dish out endless clip jobs of wry nostalgia from the archives hidden behind the brown HP sauce at the back of its larder. It's like that fairy tale with the never-ending, overflowing giant bowl of porridge. You can try to stop it, but it just keeps coming out of your telly at an enormous rate. Of course, just like Reeling in the Ye a r s , we pretend to wrinkle our noses at these curdled old clips.

But we secretly lap it all up and do everything but lick the TV screen afterwards.

The Calor Kosangas Housewife of the Year came out on stage with her silver curls and with skin as pink and soft as dough.

Actually, it turned out to be Gay Byrne. It reminded me how deftly Gay handled those housewives, as he stood back to let the 1988 winner sing a ditty.

Food taster Derek Davis recalled that he said her broccoli was soggy and was never asked back on the show again. Davis looked like a bouncing baby with his groomed and dyed yellow/blonde hair, combed to perfection. Ay, he was bonnie. All he needed was a big red rosette.

Davis said freezers brought about the rise of convenience foods. (Next week: how the Spinning Jenny brought about a revolution in garish TV stretch knits. ) Although Davis did most of the talking, he left just enough room for Nell McCafferty to recall how her father stood in the kitchen "like Nureyev with the frying pan."

Monica Sheridan, a lively TV chef from the 1960s, appeared in a clip from the 1980s. "It's 20 years since I've performed on Telefis Eireann, " she joked, "as I was sacked because I licked my fingers." On daytime TV today, that's obligatory, except you have to stick your finger in everybody else's mouth too. This was perfect telly for seven o'clock of a Thursday evening. A bit like Mock Duck from yesteryear:

scraps of meat all rolled into one not-very-delicious meal. You will eat up every last episode and you will like it.

Cape Wrath was the polar opposite to the chintzy innocence of yesteryear. It is yet another drama about a fictional suburban idyll but . . . as that song from the Brady Bunch Movie soundtrack goes . . . don't let the neighbours hear you scream. It has been touted as Desperate Housewives meets Lost or Twin Peaks. A Maidstone-based drama about a community of ne'er-do-wells and families of misfortune who have all been transplanted to the same housing estate . . . as they are all part of a witness protection programme. They are big, wooden American-style houses in red, white and blue with unfinished landscaping and drab manmade lakes that remind you of a half-finished housing estate in . . . I'm sure I'll get whacked for this . . . Lucan.

As a piece of TV inbreeding, Cape Wrath is more grotesque and violent than any of the shows before it. It is a rabid pit bull of a drama: Dublin City Council would have it put down. It's more a case of Desperate Executives at Channel 4 to get us hooked on what has to be the most violent . . .

pornographic sexual violence . . .

and foul-mouthed characters on prime time from the snarl school of British acting. (Guy Ritchie has a lot to answer for. ) It vainly tried to tease us with flashbacks of burning houses and mysterious emotional connections between characters who had supposedly never met before.

More offensive than the nasty undertone was, however, the stilted writing. Bad language does not a good script make.

Here's how Channel 4 describes it: "Enter a strange new world of neighbourly intrigue, suburban surprise and startling revelation as this psychological thriller explores the nature of identity and memory." When PR people write this sort of pretentious guff, you know they're trying to dress up some gratuitous violence.

Danny Brogan (David Morrissey) moves here with his family. "Do you call this a new start?" he hollers. There's pyscho handyman Jack (Tom Hardy).

Jack rapes Danny's crossdressing son in one particularly vicious scene. Danny kills Jack.

(There's lots of bulging eyeballs and congealed blood. ) I usually feel bad for actors that get the chop in the first week. But Jack's corpse, like this drama, left me cold.