A mad professor is born

It's disgraceful that the Government refuses to treat my energy-saving inventions with the seriousness they deserve. My scheme to fit handle-powered dynamos to bus shelters (so queueing pensioners can generate electricity

However, my new cat-and-toast theory will soon stop the mockery. You see, I've noticed that when a cat is dropped, it always lands on its paws, and when toast is dropped, it always lands butter-side-down. So I propose strapping toast (buttersideup) to the back of cats, who will then be forced to hover inches above the ground, rotating furiously.

Once a giant buttered-toast-and-cat network is in place, it'll generate enough energy to power an antigravity monorail linking London to Manchester, and all that will be left for others to do will be to work out why anyone would want to be linked to Manchester.

"Every day, each of us uses enough power to make 2,000 pieces of toast," declared Garry Lavin at the start of last night's Every Home Should Have One (BBC2), thereby displaying a bread-and-butter approach to science that's very similar to my own. However, this manic love child of Fred Dibnah and Adam Hart-Davis does differ from me in one respect, because he actually understands how familiar gadgets and gizmos work, whereas that part of my brain cannot even generate enough power to toast a crouton.

His new series is the televisual equivalent of those simple-to-understand Ladybird books, with which science teachers in the late Sixties tried to inculcate in me the basic principles of physics. And while some viewers might have felt slightly patronised by his simplistic explanations of "the mechanics of everyday life," I was soon purring as contentedly as my two cats (Chlamydia and Herpes), because when it comes to matters scientific, my IQ is still in single figures.

Last night's edition chronicled the development of domestic power, starting with ways that Orkney folk used to keep warm in Skara Brae, 5,000 years ago.

Apparently, they had invented fire and roofs, but not chimneys (so the atmosphere in the living room was so thick with smoke that watching television was pretty much out of the question), and they augmented their heat supply by bringing sheep into their rooms, a policy that's still followed today in some of Swansea's cheaper hotels (though for different reasons).

The development of fireplaces and flues improved the situation a good deal, but the great leap forward was piped gas, which allowed people to enjoy not just domestic lighting, but gas-powered radios, too. Indeed, I've often suspected that Classic FM is still gas-powered, because its "easy listening" output seems to consist almost entirely of flatus and methane.

Lavin explained clearly and simply how the various inventions worked, his likeable presentation marred only by an over-reliance on wack and zane.

Scarcely a minute went by without him tapping or drawing on the TV screen, or coercing a brass band into performing That's Lifestyle antics with bits of central-heating equipment, and some of his puns (such as referring to a pair of heat-radiating sheep as "a two-baa fire") were so weak that they could barely stand.

Nevertheless, he gave a coherent summary of the way that a simple log fire had gradually developed into the Aga, a symbol of Middle England that's become so totemic that I believe Joanna Trollope actually lives in one.