Park-bench philosophy

What with the Government planning to force the "hard-core unemployed" off benefit and into jobs, I'm surprised that I've still had nothing back from Blair regarding my modest proposal for "people power", which will ensure that pensioners also pay their way. It's simple. Every bus stop in the country will be kitted out with a row of handles connected to electricity generators (and thence to the National Grid), and pensioners will be required to turn them vigorously while waiting for their bus, and won't be allowed to have their free ride until a meter shows they've generated enough energy to cover the cost.

Not only will this system reduce hypothermia and increase physical fitness among the elderly, but the sight of a line of octogenarians manually creating sufficient electricity to power a small town will surely encourage the young to emulate their Stakhanovite feats of production, which can only be a good thing for national morale. I'm also working on a modified export version for American penitentiaries, so that prisoners on Death Row can generate the electricity for their own executions and no longer be a burden on the state.

My modest proposal for the elderly may seem cruel, but I'm only reflecting the widespread discriminatory attitude of our society, which is obsessed with youth and sees old age as a problem, rather than something to celebrate.

Television in particular seldom has any use for those who are in the autumn of their years, so I was pleased to see that Channel 4 had devoted this week's Slot to a trio of elderly contributors. However, calling the programmes Advice from the Young at Heart didn't augur well for the project; "young at heart" being the sort of patronising and meaningless phrase used decades ago by Radio 2 broadcasters, along with "93 years young" and "you're only as old as you feel". And after watching all three films, I found myself awash with senescent wisdom that was so shallow and vacuous that it made The Little Book of Calm seem like Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Just as homespun clothes invariably lack the finesse of a tailormade suit, so homespun philosophy lacks the flair and profundity of professional thought. So when 87-year-old Cecilia Nichols began by telling us flatly that "nobody can ever obtain the unobtainable", I wasn't surprised to see that she was occupying not the chair of Logical Positivism at Cambridge, but a humble park bench on a summer's day.

"Happiness is fleeting," she continued. "You have days when nothing goes right," and even Chauncey Gardener would have had difficulty making such remarks sound sagacious, rather than trite, although I was mildly intrigued when she told us that "people who have 14 inches" secretly long "to have 21 inches". I think she was talking about relative sizes of television screen, and I certainly hope so, because otherwise she and her fellow pensioners will all be far too shagged out to be able to turn my handles.

"People aspire to be happy all the time, but they can't," was the next platitude. By now it wasn't primarily Cecilia's wisdom and judgment that I was questioning. Rather, it was the wisdom and judgment of Sarah Hamilton, the (presumably) young director/producer who had (presumably) booked Cecilia, without first bothering to ascertain whether or not she had anything worthwhile to say.

The old lady briefly started to autobiographise (has anyone ever produced an unofficial autobiography, I wonder?) by expressing her regret at not having become a teacher, due to her father's premature death; but charming as she was, it was painfully evident that she had no more idea of what life is all about at 87 than she'd had at 27, so why was she chosen?

Well, suspicious minds might assume she must be a friend or relative of somebody on the production team (a touch of nepotism seldom being far below the surface in Televisionland), but more probably it's just another manifestation of what the great Alan Bennett once said: "If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize."

The Slot is one of my favourite places to go on television, because it's usually confident and unselfconscious, unlike so many programmes, whose creativity is crushed beneath the weight of executive fear that can best be summed up in one word: mortgage. But this was a poor occupant of that space, because there's little point in devoting time to philosophy (be it abstruse or popular) unless you're filming people who've actually got something original and enlightening to say.