A host of problems for Parky

Entrophy isn't what it used to be. In our increasingly disordered world we need people, programmes and products that we can rely upon, and there's something disconcertingly Stalinist about the way so many of them are silently airbrushed out of history one day, never to be mentioned again.

Blue Peter's mobile crunchy pie (Fred the Tortoise) has gone, Gary Glitter's hits no longer feature on the soundtrack of I Love the 1970s, Nestles no longer rhymes with "wrestles" and Opal Fruits are now called Starburst (although, judging from the size of some of the people who eat them, they should have been renamed Uranus Drops).

And no more can impecunious groups of Saturday night drinkers club together to buy a Party Seven, a giant can of cheap beer which, when you punctured the lid, spurted like the ejaculation from the blowhole of a sexually-aroused sperm whale, as six of your seven pints promptly ended up drenching the ceiling and walls of somebody else's kitchen.

But Michael Parkinson has seemingly been a permanent fixture in BBC1's Saturday night schedule since 1971, staying there through thick and thin (that's David Beckham and Calista Flockhart, though not on the same show).

Well, that's what we were supposed to believe when the final edition of Parkinson was broadcast over the weekend, because nobody had the temerity to mention the host's disastrous decision to leave the Corporation in the early Eighties and squander his talent first at TV-AM, then on a series of trivial ITV game shows.

His return to BBC1 in 1997 was universally welcomed, but he has clearly become bored with many of the younger guests he's had to converse with over the past couple of years, so much so that he's sometimes sounded uncharacteristically under-prepared (although how can you research when there's nothing to research?), and has even started telling anecdotes himself, rather than listening dutifully to theirs.

So perhaps it's as well that the imminent return of Match of the Day has persuaded him to try his luck at ITV again, even though I fear the move will prove only one thing: that when history repeats itself, the price always goes up.

How each guest descends those famous stairs has usually given us a fair indication of their enthusiasm at being there, and that was certainly the case on Saturday night. Boris Becker ambled sluggishly down them with all the pizzazz of a jaded celeb who is midway through an extended book-plugging tour, then told us that "Tim Henman could win Wimbledon ... he performs well on the grass" in tones so lethargic that he might well have been performing on the grass himself.

Patrick Kielty, however, positively raced down the steps in his eagerness to display his uncompromising lack of talent to the nation, and was soon telling us a "true story" about a nun and a dildo (that was a lie when Bob Monkhouse used to tell it 30 years ago) and showing us a clip of himself standing next to starving street children in India, raising money for charridee.

These fund-raising ventures are a reciprocal arrangement, of course, because the celebrities' hungry egos are also fed by the uncritical TV coverage, but if these charity programmes want to convey the despair and misery of real hunger, surely there's nothing more poignant than the sight of Vanessa Feltz's pathetic expression immediately after consuming one of the Colonel's family buckets?