Who says size matters?

Ever since my pioneering remake of a classic French film (The Paraplegics of Cherbourg, starring Christopher Reeve and Stephen Hawking) was booed off the screen at Cannes, I have had absolutely no interest in going to the cinema.

And I say that without a shred of shame, because although movies have far bigger budgets than television programmes, the cinemas you're expected to watch them in are invariably far less pleasant than an evening spent in one's own house, with a fridge, kettle and corkscrew all close at hand.

A recent ill-advised visit to a multiscreen confirmed my belief that they're just as Rank as they were in the late Sixties, when a cinema outing mainly consisted of standing by a kiosk in the foyer, chewing on a "lightly steamed" (soggy) bun containing a "juicy hot dog" (a tastefree tube of pink extruded kapok, sometimes with a suspicious vein running down one side) accompanied by a carton of luke-warm Kia Ora orange drink.

And I still haven't forgotten how I once nearly froze to death outside my local cinema after mistakenly queueing for three weeks to see a film called Closed for the Winter (the sign on the door turned out to be a warning, not a movie title).

Back in the days when I did go to the cinema regularly, my favourite entertainment wasn't the overhyped main feature, but the Children's Film Foundation shorts, the brief Look at Life inserts, the public information films and the other eclectic bits of grouting in the evening.

And that's equally true of my TV watching, because the most worthwhile programmes often aren't the interminable banalities of Big Brother or It'll Be Alright On The Night 1,975,835, but little nuggets of public broadcasting gold like The Slot.

Unlike the rest of Channel 4's prime-time output, these miniprogrammesare free from the tyranny of the "overnights" ( audience figures), and the directors are therefore left alone to make whatever three-minute films they want to, without outside interference from nervous (and often idiotic) commissioning editors who are both pitch blind and obsessed with ratings.

Better still, they're ideally scheduled to catch the attention of bookish people who "only watch television for the news", because C4 News is the best there is, and these miniature codas will amply repay them for an extra 180 seconds of viewing.

This week's series is entitled Who Cares? and has told the stories of four of this nation's unsung and under-appreciated heroes.

We've heard from three women who devote most of their waking hours to looking after their brain-damaged sons or Alzheimer-afflicted mother, and last night's final instalment focused on David, whose wife Angela recently lost the use of the right side of her body after suffering a stroke.