An evening last week and there we are, as has become customary, slumped in front of the box. We're watching that trailer for Ashes to Ashes, the 1980s time-travelling cop show. You must have seen it. I don't need this pressure on, I don't need this pressure on, I don't need this pressure ohhh-ohhhn. Gene Hunt, Alex Drake, the guy with the perm and the other one. They pull up outside a nightclub in a very red car, pile in and then launch an unprovoked assault on a bunch of spivvy gangsters with ponytails. Then they chuck them in the back of a van. It's like a music video, with punching. “That was brilliant,” says the wife, and she's right. Round our way, this is exactly the sort of thing we slump for.

Afterwards, Newsnight, all about the alleged police brutality at the G20 demos. It looks obvious now, I'll grant you, but at the time it just doesn't click. I must be watching for a good five minutes, possibly drooling, before I make any sort of mental connection between all that and the Ashes to Ashes trailer. “Oh look,” I grunt, eventually. “That's a bit unfortunate.” And then, beyond idly speculating as to whether the Daily Mail might drum this up into a NEW BBC GAFFE (it isn't), I promptly forget all about it.

Until the weekend, anyway, when people started mentioning the CIA's torture memo in the same breath as Jack Bauer from 24. My first thought was that this was deeply unfair. In torture terms, Bauer runs rings around these people. He's certainly quicker. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, and each time it lasted 20 minutes. Allowing for commercial breaks, that's basically the entirety of seasons one to three. Grimmest TV ever. Even we wouldn't slump for that.

My next thought, though, was of Gene Hunt. Why do we make heroes out of him and Bauer, and affect such horror for their real life counterparts? It's not enough to just say that one is fiction, and one isn't. I'm sure popular heroes weren't always this twisted. There's a dark sort of psychology at play here, full of inner conflict and self-loathing. When historians come to write books about how mad we all were, this is exactly the sort of thing they'll cite. You just wait and see.

Downwardly mobile

A friend e-mails me a link to one of these online Budget calculators. You stick in your salary, along with your booze habits, cars and suchlike, and it tells you whether you're a winner or a loser in what has been called “THE RETURN OF CLASS WAR”. He's feeling smug, my friend, because he's up, by about three hundred quid a year. “Congratulations,” I say, while keeping the condescension out of my voice. “Poor sod,” I think. “He always did look shabby.” Then I have a go. It turns out I'm in the same boat. Thanks to Mr Darling, I'll be better off by almost £30 a month.

I'm mortified. I may not be a wealthy person, but damn it, a chap has a certain view of himself. When a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer uses a Budget to declare CLASS WAR, some of us instinctively expect to be on a certain side. The side with port, in my case. And top hats. Maybe monocles. But no. I'm nowhere near. I'm on the other side. The dingy side. How is a fellow supposed to show his face in decent society, when he has benefited from a class-war Budget? One simply daren't go outside.

Fat chance

Hillary Clinton thinks that fighting climate change is like trying to lose weight. “Often times when you face such an overwhelming challenge as global climate change, it can be somewhat daunting,” she told her US State Department colleagues on Wednesday, adding: “It's kind of like trying to lose weight, which I know something about.”

On the face of it, this analogy doesn't make an awful lot of sense. But maybe it does if you are Hillary. “Do I need to lose weight?” she'll have asked Bill. “Nope,” he will have replied, eyes still on the intern's bum. Anybody else would probably have said the same thing. Who'd have the nerve to tell her she needed to lose weight? But with all the hubbub about it from elsewhere, she'd surely have known. Provided nobody actually said it to her face, though, she could kid herself otherwise. Call them a fringe minority, with an agenda. Cranks, even. Maybe Al Gore started droning on about it once, but was so boring that she stopped listening.

Loser takes it all

I've just been e-mailed a link to a second Budget calculator. According to it, I'm actually losing out next year, to the tune of slightly over £9. Phew.

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