THE television viewing habits of the nation are both fascinating and fickle. While we lap up crime dramas (and we just love our TV detectives such as Inspector Morse), the real thing, it would appear, is less interesting.

Hence the announcement this week that the venerable Crimewatch is being put out to grass (or paroled, if you prefer a crime-related analogy) after some 33 years. From its heyday when Nick Ross would sign off with the immortal words "don't have nightmares, sleep well", Crimewatch has all but fallen off today's TV viewers' radars and is probably watched by fewer people than who watch Homes Under the Hammer.

You'd have thought real-life crime would be as fascinating to television viewers as it is to newspaper readers - but it clearly isn't. Yet crime remains an absolutely riveting subject for readers. Local newspapers are often criticised by their online readers for their apparent obsession with crime. Typical comments see papers being slated for not carrying enough "good news"; and it is a safe bet that anyone even vaguely associated with a local crime or court case will take to a paper's website to rant about "irrelevant" reporting of stories that are of no interest to anyone.

Unfortunately, however, it is the human condition to home in on bad news, rather than good news. A school receiving a good Ofsted report, for example, is good news. It's unlikely to enthrall the average newspaper reader, however. No, what readers like - no matter how much they may protest otherwise - is good old bad news. Court stories (the more salacious the better, generally), crime, crashes and general destruction are what get readers interested, and no story about a church flower festival (unless someone gets murdered during it, of course - preferably by a vicar with a penchant for choir boys) is going to trump any of those. Add dog fouling, litter-blighted streets, delayed trains and councils' shortcomings when it comes to collecting our bins and you've more or less got a full hand in terms of what people want to read about.

Any glance at the "most read" section of a local paper's website will bear this out. Nationally, it's all about celebrities falling from grace (or, even better, putting on loads of weight). Royal marriages and births are among the few stand-out good news stories which readers are most likely to be interested in. And even then, if it's a choice between a royal birth or a royal death/divorce, it's a fairly safe bet which one is likely to get the most web hits or sell the most copies of a paper.

Which brings me back to the demise of Crimewatch after more than three decades of helping PC Plod collar the nation's ne'er do wells. Clearly, while bad news sells in the murky world of the press, it doesn't (in its real life self) on screen. A plausible explanation for that, of course, is that when we turn on our televisions at night we are all searching for an escape from the doom and gloom of day-to-day life, although that doesn't then account for the popularity of depressing but successful dramas such as Doctor Foster (deranged and vengeful ex-wife wreaking misery and havoc) or Liar (vengeful victim of a serial rapist surgeon), both of which have attracted millions of viewers in recent weeks.

When it comes to watching real people on television, we don't want to see the real life victims of real life crimes - we want to see "celebrities" doing jives on Strictly Come Dancing or arrogant upstarts with egos the size of planets but brains the size of peas being given short shrift by Alan Sugar on The Apprentice.

Perhaps Crimewatch could yet be rescued, though. All it needs is a bit of a revamp to suit modern audiences. A group of amateur criminals could be teamed up with some professional old lags and put through their nefarious paces on a new show called Strictly Come Burgling. Four police officers could be the judges. Or even some judges could be the judges. Or they could be divided up into teams, a la The Apprentice (they could give themselves team names such as Callous or Hapless) and sent out on tasks such as pick pocketing in the street or selling dodgy frozen fish door-to-door; the worst performers being fired by Lord Sugar after a suitable dressing down in front of us viewers. Now, that really would be the stuff of nightmares.

NO surprise that the transition from the old £1 coins to the new has proved so chaotic. On Monday the old coins ceased to be legal tender in the UK - unless you happened to be shopping at Tesco or buying a Big Mac Meal.

Many retailers have been caught on the hop by the transition - and although some are blaming it on "human error", it is clear that there is widespread flouting of the new rules. Car park machines have become impossible to use because they haven't been adapted to accept the new-shaped £1 coins - but you can bet your bottom dollar that it's the poor old members of the public who'll take the flak for that and end up getting issued with fixed penalty notices all over the place. Some 5,000 car parking machines across the country still cannot accept the new £1 coins - and it is reported that many will not be able to do so until February next year.

Here's an idea: given that the chaos is entirely the fault of the organisations whose job it was sort this out, let's have a car parking amnesty until next spring. Who knows, it may actually make the great British public start using town centres again if they didn't have to pay to park.

WELL, Storm Ophelia certainly lived up to her name - she was completely bonkers. How disorientating it seemed to drive to work on Monday morning into what looked liked sunset, so strangely orange was the sky. All morning I felt as though I was accidentally working a night shift; God, it was miserable.

The culprits (courtesy of Ophelia) were red dust from the Sahara and the wildfires of Portugal being blown our way. Whatever it was, it certainly made for a very strange day. Thirty years after the Great Storm, aka Michael Fish's Worst Day at Work, Ophelia was in many ways something of a damp squib in these parts, wind-wise. But she certainly made her mark.

It's a cliche to talk of a "weather event" but in this instance I'm prepared to accept that Ophelia provided us with one. Red skies at night and in the mornings are the stuff of rhymes. Red skies at lunchtime, however, seem positively apocalyptic.