Costa living comes down

It was while sitting at my desk, attempting to make clockwise circles with my right foot while drawing the number six in the air with my right hand (try it - it's impossible), that I thought of three radical new ways to combat the growing problem of house theft. One involves the Islamic punishment of chopping off a convicted burglar's hand, although our system would be merciful and allow for judicial review (robbers who won on appeal would be identifiable by the stitches on their wrists).

Another simply requires a cardboard cut-out of Posh Spice to be placed near an upstairs window overlooking the street so robbers would avoid the house, knowing that Posh is always surrounded by at least 100 photographers.

And my third home security plan involves a feng shui expert telling you to remove all your belongings from your house, in order that the "chi" energy might flow freely (so there would be nothing left to steal), then presenting you with a £1,000 invoice for his services, which are summarised in an ancient Chinese proverb: "There's one born every minute, and you can see them coming a mile away."

Strictly speaking, house theft is a rare phenomenon because criminals seldom steal entire houses, preferring to pilfer the small and easily- transportable contents instead. It's those telltale knickknacks, gewgaws, articles of virtu, and bibelots (how I detest those words) that give a property its character, rather than the bricks and mortar, and BBC1's Through the Keyhole has spent the past 17 years inviting us to guess the identity of celebrities by discreetly rifling through their treasured personal possessions.

Of all the game shows I've ever reviewed during my 147 years as a TV critic, this is the one format I really wish I'd invented because it simply yet brilliantly taps into two British obsessions (curtain-twitching voyeurism and class obsession), and the shower of front-door keys in the opening titles certainly suggests that we're going to see something of the celeb's private life, behind their public persona.

Speaking of keys, incidentally, those titles persuaded me to examine my own key ring, and I discovered no fewer than six that have been there for years, and which I can no longer associate with any lock. Can you do better with yours? First prize for the winner: a lifetime's supply of oxygen.

Sadly, the show's prime-time days have gone, and the downmarket daytime slot it has occupied in recent years has seldom tempted anyone higher than D-list hairdressers to open the doors of their rainswept Barratt homes to the cameras. But the producers are now partially addressing that problem by going abroad, so although they're still mostly dealing with has-beens and minor soap stars, at least there's some sunshine to improve the view.

The view has also been improved by removing the Bostonian Hooray Loyd Grossman from the role of investigator, and replacing him with Catherine Gee, who looks stunning from the neck down, although a full shot reveals her to be a classic Bobfoc (Body Off Baywatch, Face Off Crimewatch).

Still, this former assistant editor of Country Living is a considerable improvement on Loyd and his strangulated vocal delivery, but where has he gone? To a private hospital, perhaps, where he'll dream about the "fantastic" and "scrumptious" menus he created for NHS hospitals, as he waits for the operation he's needed for years - a full manual evacuation of the vowels.

The panel ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, with Barry Cryer (our Greatest Living Englishman) proving reliably hilarious, while Jono Coleman absurdly showed off his new "slimmer" torso (for God's sake, where are those weapons of mass reduction?).