Time on my hands meant I could check e-mail inboxes I rarely access. I discovered that someone had been passing one of the addresses around to people who then used it to contact me about this column. This despite the fact that an address for this purpose always appears at the end of it.

Be that as it may, this could have been part of a concerted campaign which led to a load of e-mails about that edition of Xarabank where the main guest was Maltese-Australian lawyer, Joseph Carmel Chetcuti. He is the author of Queer Mediterranean Memories, which hypothesises on the sexual orientation of every Tom, Dick and Harry. Allegations are cheap; proof is rather harder to come by.

Chetcuti got more exposure (read: another opportunity to vent his spleen) on Ray Calleja's programme. It was, inevitably, only the people who called in to Radju Marija who gave him bad publicity.

I must be one of the handful of people in Malta who do not watch Xarabank come hell or high water. But what struck me is that none of the mail I received about the matter was copied to Where's Everybody? A few phone calls to people who I know do watch the show religiously elicited the fact that no-one in the audience decided to show reprobation.

It could be, of course, that the type of people who attend Xarabank and other shows as part of the general audience - and not as plants or people on the panel - are not the type to get up and express their opinion, for fear of being booted out of the studio and losing out on the freebies and goodies at the end.

The same may be said for quiz contestants. How many of them have the guts to insist the quizmaster is wrong when they are certain their reply is the correct one?

Being in front of a camera does funny things to people. Take Alicia Guastaferro, for instance. She is one of those girls who does the beauty pageant circuit. Indeed, this was used as a pivot when her family took part in Wife Swap. Although at the time she appeared to relish her role as tiara-ed teenager, she has now decided to sue ABC network and parent company Disney for $100 million, alleging psychological trauma - to the extent that from an honour-roll student she became a special education student.

Here, a tiny reminder of the premise of Wife Swap is in order: the mothers in two families with radically different lifestyles swap houses for a week - just as Mayumi Heene, mother of Falcon (the 'balloon boy') had done - twice.

People who actively seek their 15 minutes of fame do not realise they come with baggage they might not be strong enough to bear. Some people expect to be 'discovered'. Some, alas, merely make fools of themselves. Others manage to do both, simultaneously.

Fame sometimes drops into the laps of people who are morphed into cartoon characters for cartoon shows such as The Simpsons and South Park - with Tiger Woods being a 'guest' (getting sexual healing treatment in a class made up of other personalities) in the latter.

Some people prefer to be on the other side of the camera by way of writing for the people facing it.

• The authors whose works were chosen for the Stejjer Qosra, shortly to be aired on One Television, were invited to attend a preliminary meeting with the producer, Mark Doneo, and his team. They unanimously agreed to release their stories for copy-editing and scripting. In layman's language this means that 'minor details may be altered for clarity'.

Last Thursday, all the directors and crews involved in the filming met in order to sort out the final details in the pre-production processes of the series set-up.

Casting and location selections are well underway, and filming will start as soon as possible.

• The British Advertising Standards Association has slated an advertorial intended to shock us into curtailing our carbon footprints. The clip showed a parent reading a bedtime story based on Rub-A-Dub-Dub and Jack and Jill to his daughter. However in this amalgamation, climate change had wrought grave damage on the planet.

The child's question as to whether the tale had a happy ending was not answered by her father; rather, the narrator tells us that what happens next is up to us.

Floella Benjamin, who presented children's programmes such as Play School and Play Away had something to say about 'happy endings' - albeit as they were presented in 'bubblegum shows' such as Hannah Montana and High Street Musical, which, according to her, 'dumb down' the younger generations.

Insisting that "a child's mind is like a blank canvas", she said it was wrong for them to be force-fed a diet of vapid, conveyor-belt imported shows when their parents used the TV as a baby-sitter.

Hot on the news that Play England has issued a manifesto including demands for a 32 kph speed limit in residential areas, and that children's access to safe places to play should be treated as a serious political issue, Ms Benjamin insists that children's television should be the "Number One policy area" for the election, adding that it was the government's responsibility to make sure children's television is funded properly.

When these concerns are voiced by any Maltese columnist, they are taken with a pinch of salt by the administrations and managements of different stations, who then cite budget constraints. Enough said.

television@timesofmalta.com