Do Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst still get together for a glass of milk stout in the snug bar of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street?

What about those East End pensioners Dot Cotton, Ethel Skinner and Lou Beale. Are they still pals?

And dear old Annie Sugden. Is she still busy in the kitchen at Emmerdale Farm waiting for her sons to return from the fields for a no frills Yorkshire dinner?

To be honest I don’t know and couldn’t care less.

I really am out of touch with what is happening in the popular TV soaps.

In fact I find so little of interest in television land.

Unlike my Star colleague Chrissy Symmons, I do have a TV (fully digital etc etc) but I rarely watch it. (Read Chissy’s blog here.)

The only thing I’ve seen over the past seven days, apart from the BBC news channel, is an episode of the excellent documentary series “A History of Ancient Britain” and my boys from Wales beating Scotland in the Six Nations rugby.

Before anyone says I should get a life, it is because I have one that the dross on television fails to attract my attention and time.

This brings me to the news that peers have called for a reduction in the number of TV advertisements, saying they are not in viewers’ interests.

They want satellite and cable channels to cut the average number of minutes sold per hour from nine to seven, in line with public service broadcasters.

The House of Lords communications committee say the current rules should be changed by the time the digital switchover is completed next year.

Strangely enough I’m not at all happy about this.

On the rare occasions I do watch the telly it can be the ads that I find the most enjoyable.

They are often funny and very creative and well made. So good that I struggle to remember what is actually being advertised.

A particular favourite of mine features talking meerkats! How do they do that?

I also have a vision of a man dressed in a gorilla suit playing drums to Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight. What was that all about?

However it is unlikely that I will be taking much notice of the ads over the next few days.

The TV listings don’t hold much promise so I will continue to have a life and enjoy it.

I will also spend time with books that fire my imagination and interests – reading the old fashioned way by holding a couple of hundred pages of paper bound between two hard covers, and not using a hand held screen.

But that’s another story for another time…