No more property porn please

I am a great lover of animals. Roasted, grilled, fried or raw, they're delicious, and we're obviously meant to eat them, otherwise why would they be made of meat?

I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to become a fruitarian, although I've never understood the delight that some people seem to take in blowing small holes through large mammals, not so they can consume them, but simply so they can decapitate them and display their severed heads.

As a child, when I first saw a moose's head mounted on a wall, I assumed that the beast must have been chased by men on horses and had accidentally smashed through the bricks at high speed (its horns drilling right through the plaster), and that this was what people meant when they spoke of "cowboys" involved in "knocking through".

To this day, I still check the exterior of any house that has one, half expecting to see the rest of the carcass dangling there.

There was plenty of knocking through on yesterday afternoon's Up Your Street (C4), and I even spotted the heads of one or two mooses, or is it meese (like goose and geese)?

Simon O'Brien would doubtless be able to solve that lexicographical conundrum, because the former Brookside teenager with his scallyfromthe-alley Scouse patois has now transmogrified into a greying property show presenter, who confidently expresses himself in an extraordinarily grandiloquent vocabulary (whether he understands what he's saying is another matter).

"Oh, the expectancy, the expectancy," he declared as he introduced his tedious show, in which "we take neighbours into each other's seemingly identical houses and compare their styles and find out whose is worth the most." If this format was a blueprint for a house, it would surely never get planning permission.

Yesterday's edition came from the dismal city of Sheffield where, for kicks, youths watch the traffic lights change colour (although it's a great place to buy a house, because if it gets repossessed, you won't mind).

O'Brien homed in on two comparatively exclusive Victorian properties in Peel Terrace, but before letting the owners view each other's back passages and beyond, he took the opportunity to rhapsodise verbally in private, with only the camera for company.

"Palatial, very grandiose," he began, gushing ecstatically over the "fantastic quarter-turn staircase with gorgeous ornate brackets", and later becoming positively orgasmic as he fondled the "exquisite" stair rods. For his sake, I hope he never makes the same mistake I once did, of confusing a stair rod with a steroid. I couldn't sit down for a month afterwards.