When my father handed over pocket money every Saturday, he would say - with characteristic courtly irony - “There you are. Spend it wisely”. He was well aware of our liquorice-and- capguns habit and knew we wouldn't be wise at all. But he has been echoing in my head these past few days, and every news story amplifies the warning. Recession looms, money grows tight: it pays to spend wisely, and not just on the supermarket shop.

Take the Olympics. Over these astonishing days of British gold, it has become a truism that generous funding (John Major's lottery money) can bear golden fruit. Clearly, most of that money was indeed spent wisely, on the frontline reality of sport: equipment, facilities, training, athletes enabled to give up the day job.

Thus they sailed, ran, swam, rowed, canoed and cycled to glory. Commentators have drawn Olympic comparisons with other national projects - particularly education and healthcare - marvelling at what investment can do and wondering why in more mundane areas, years of high taxation and government spending have not given us more bang for our buck.

The obvious answer is that the authorities failed to listen to my Dad. Spending has been less than wise. In education, the administrative, structural and exam systems are subject to constant expensive tinkering, and hundreds of millions are poured into rigid national testing and inspection regimes (at times incompetently run) that have little benign effect on the real front line, the classroom. In fact, they sometimes compromise its effectiveness. Yet more money gets lashed out on marginal disciplines and woolly social-conditioning projects.

I do not think the Olympic cyclists and sailors were constantly distracted from their training by sudden demands that they work to freshly made-up rules, nor that they had to break off and listen to sententious lectures on how velodrome cyclists must respect the cultures of the boxing and beach-volleyball communities.

As for the NHS, its chronicles of waste, bad IT decisions and fatty degeneration of the administrative system are legion. Costly logos, leaflets and rampant managerialism flourish while the front line often goes short of expertise, beds and medicines. To offer one small example of this mindset: I fell into a rage when an NHS Trust approached me (unsuccessfully) through a showbiz agent to give a “motivational talk” to a group of their managers. I would have done the damn thing free, if I seriously thought I had anything to say, but they offered £5,000. I looked up their record online, and this same trust was closing wards for lack of nurses.

To pluck a wider example from the air, the new GP contracts were so famously ill-considered that surprised doctors suddenly found themselves getting bonuses for doing things they already did anyway, and rewarded for futile exercises such as making lists of fat patients. Meanwhile, newly qualified doctors can't find work, and weekend on-call services, impersonal and unresponsive, are a continuing disgrace to the humane front line of medical care. The money came in, some hit its target, but much could have been spent more wisely.

You are bored by now with examples of central government waste, so I shan't trouble you with examples, merely observing that never a week passes without reckless “outsourcing” and bad PFI deals resulting in dangerous data loss or some vast new debt bequeathed to our children.

A decade of prosperity dealt the final blow to any parsimonious wartime tradition of public servants switching lights off, using both sides of the paper and lecturing newcomers on saving taxpayers' money. And at the top, gimmicks and salaries float ever higher; government is infected by the familiar boom-time shopaholic belief that the very act of spending money gives you power and status, even if it shows little result.

But leave all that and move to another area, still towing my Dad's dictum behind you. We have just had the Edinburgh Television festival, and the telly world offers even more interesting examples of failure to spend wisely. The stout defence of entertainment and intelligent populism made by Peter Fincham, ITV's director of television, was welcome, but is only part of the story. TV today offers a classic opposite to the Olympic money principle, which probably explains why so little of it is golden.

There is lots of money in television: a vast licence fee income for the BBC and rich (though now precarious) advertising for the rest. Public attention is always drawn to the huge fees of “star” presenters and the incredible top salaries - the BBC Director-General gets four times as much as the Prime Minister, and Michael Grade five times. What is less well known is that down at the front line of programme-making, money is very tight indeed. Important shows such as Newsnight are told to cut back by a fifth; much routine television is now made for half as much as even five years ago.

And it shows. Camerawork and production values slide, crass mistakes are made, corners are cut (sometimes dishonestly) on all networks. Experienced people are replaced by cheap, young, short-contract staff. Fading standards, I hasten to say, are not

the fault of these footsoldiers: they often have their hearts and spirits broken by the cheeseparing conditions under which they work. But they, not senior management or stars, are the people who make the real product, and wiser spending would put them first.

Yet confused by their own crazy salaries, TV executives tend to freeze in panic at lean times and ignore the daily programme staff while they suck up their own bonuses and sign mad contracts with a few celebrity stars. This is the precise equivalent of noticing that your house is dirty and run-down, and deciding not to clean or decorate or fix the guttering, but instead to buy a large expensive sofa and plonk it down in the tatty squalor hoping that will do the trick.

It doesn't. Anyone who remembers the failure of the “famous five” at TV-am should know that stars are not the whole answer. Rippon, Ford, Parkinson, Frost and Kee rose to prominence on the back of brilliant, well-funded, confident, seasoned production teams at the BBC and ITN. Without these, they embarrassingly failed.

The moral of all these diverse, sad tales is that money poured on the top of any organisation doesn't necessarily trickle down and fertilise the roots. Ask any gardener: water the leaves and they just shrivel in the sun. For healthy results you have to feed the roots: cherish your end-product, whether it is a learning child or a hospital ward or a programme, and give it priority. The rest is mere liquorice and popguns.

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