It's holiday time and don't us TV fans know it

You could certainly be forgiven for thinking so, because we have been shepherded through the death throes of June, and jolted into July with what must go down as some of the most miserable weekend schedules in living memory.

Now I know broadcasters like to save their biggest hitters for when the nights draw in and we're more prone to be curled up in front of the gogglebox with our cups of cocoa.

I also accept that times are tight, and there isn't the sort of big bucks swilling round at the moment to bankroll enough fresh and exclusive content to cover all 52 weeks of the year.

But come on, folks. That's no excuse for the sort of lame, lazy, uninspired dross which has been offered up as an excuse for entertainment over the past couple of Saturdays.

As if one repeated episode of impossibly cheerful Harry Hill and You've Been Framed isn't bad enough, ITV have been giving them to us back-to-back. That's exhibit one for the prosecution.

Exhibit two is the plethora of 'celebrities doing funny things' programmes. They're everywhere. Pointless Celebrities and Celebrity Mastermind on BBC1, All Star Family Fortunes on ITV,

Davina McCall bellowing at more poor folk in the Million Pound Drop on Channel 4, and, last but not least, the return of Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes. . . erm, sorry, I mean a brand new show called Your Face Sounds Familiar.

Credit where it's due, it's not easy to concoct a programme with presenters who can exude such a pungent lack of chemistry, and where the 'performances' are consistently hilarious for all the wrong reasons.

At least it is raising money for charity, I suppose. But then, what was it someone said to me the other day? Too many programmes think they can get away with 'absolute tripe' by playing the charity card. So here's exhibit three for the jury.

All we've needed to well and truly complete the misery was the return of The Wall, with stars contorting out-of-condition frames while trussed up like Christmas turkeys, and a second series of Tom Daley's diving disaster Splash!

So how about losing ourselves in a decent film on one of the main five channels? Ah, well, if you count yourself as a movie fan and could find one you haven't seen several times before, you're a better man than I.

We've had dirty-vested Bruce Willis in Die Hard With A Vengeance from 1995, Wyatt Earp western Tombstone from 1993, Harrison Ford in Patriot Games from 1992, and Clint Eastwood in Space Cowboys from 2000 (at last, something that was at least made this century!)

And talking of repeats – the brief excitement of seeing crackpot comedy Mrs Brown's Boys back on the agenda was soon extinguished by the revelation that it was a re-run of the first series in 2001. Sigh.

At least you can rely on one thing. Grumpy old 92-year-old Charlie Fairhead is still going strong in Casualty, the medical series that just keeps on giving. Ironically, it's one of the few Saturday shows not in need of surgery.

BBC2 at 10pm summed it all up. What a Load of Buzzcocks. . .

Read Carl Jones first in your Weekend Shropshire Star, every Saturday