I KNOW a man who has seven television sets; one for every room in his house. He even has a telly in his bathroom.

This, to me, is strange enough, but the fact that the screen is strategically placed to point, not at the bath, but at the toilet seat, borders on the bizarre.

In our home, there is but one television, tucked away discreetly in a corner of the living room.

Under normal circumstances, I don't watch a lot of telly. Just a handful of regular programmes (ER, 24, Desperate Housewives are required viewing these days).

But these are not normal circumstances. For the past month I've been on the pat-and-mick;

nothing life threatening, you understand, maybe just age catching up with me. Consequently, sheer boredom has forced me to watch more television than is probably good for me. A worrying development, yes, but a temporary aberration, surely.

I have found myself in the dead of night taping ancient episodes of Sharpe on UK Gold and then watching them during the day. This cannot be healthy. Yet it is better by far than actually watching daytime TV. For there be monsters. And no monster is bigger and more terrifying than Trisha (five, daily 9.25am).

Here we have a freak show masquerading as an issue-driven programme.

With a banality that knows no bounds, it plucks the saddest of life's unfortunates, every one an object for your pity not your scorn, and gives them their 15 minutes of infamy. Tasteless, trite, and trashy, it is television made for fools by fools.

Take Wednesday's edition as a humdinger of an example. The subject matter was "the loveable rogue". Why, asked tiresome Trish, do some women fall for wicked men.

Enter the grossly overweight Julia, with the aid of a walking stick. Under the strapline "I'm hooked on Abu Hamza", this poor woman explained, or tried to explain, why she fancied the socks off the world's ugliest terrorist suspect, currently residing at Bellmarsh detention centre.

The pair, it seems, have started corresponding with each other.

"He never mentions terrorism, " she said, naively (his letters will be carefully censored, after all). Her pal, Carol, seated beside her, was asked what on earth Julia saw in Hamza. "She just likes big men, " she replied. And with that I hit the red button on the remote.

Suddenly, I saw the method in the madness of the aforementioned man with the seven televisions. At least I now know why he has a set in the bathroom. It must be to watch Trisha. For the toilet is the only place for it. Shows like this are so dreadfully outdated. No-one seems to have told Ms Goddard and five that we've moved on from Jerry Springer. Indeed, even Jerry Springer has moved on from Jerry Springer.

Mocking the afflicted, which is basically what Trisha does for a living, is a worrying trait in television.

Indeed, five is currently the main culprit. Take their largely insensitive and luridly-titled strand of Monday night documentaries about people with a variety of strange medical or psychological conditions.

And yet, sandwiched between last week's The Woman Swamped by her own Skin and next week's The Baby who Weighs Six Stones, was an absolute gem of a programme.

Proof, perhaps, that if you throw enough garbage against the wall, some of it is bound to stick.

The Boy With the Incredible Brain was a revealing and quite fascinating documentary about 26-year-old Daniel Tammet (at that age more a man than a boy), a savant with a remarkable gift for figures.

Remarkable is hardly the word.

Off the top of his head, Daniel could recite pi to almost 23,000 decimal points (I'm assuming he got it right because, to me, pi is a pastry dish that's lost an "e").

He was a human calculating machine. Asked a devilishly complex mathematical equation - 37 to the power of seven, say - his eyes appeared to glaze over. But he wasn't dreaming; he was working it out. Correctly, as it turned out.

This was special enough, but what made Daniel really exceptional was the fact that, unlike most savants, he showed few if any signs of autism and could connect with the reality of normal human beings.

Thus, he could describe the mental process which his brain went through.

He saw numbers, not as figures like you and me, but as colours and shapes and textures.

His talent did not end with the numbers game. Breathtaking, too, was his ability to master languages.

Programme-maker Simon Gooder challenged him to learn Icelandic in the space of a week. He did, becoming sufficiently proficient to engage in a television interview for Icelandic television. The boy could talk. And count.

It is programmes like this that, after a diet of daytime dross, restore your faith in the medium. Likewise, tucked away after the 10 o'clock news on Tuesday, was To Courtney With Love (BBC1, 11.15pm ), part of the admirable One Life series.

Tender, touching and painfully sad, it was a film about a brave teenage mother, Beckie Williamson, who, suffering from a terminal illness, made a video diary as a legacy for her baby daughter, Courtney.

She was, she said, not scared of dying, she was scared of leaving Courtney behind. Of not being able to see her and be there when she was growing up.

She was only 16 when she died and, between her diagnosis (she was suffering from bone cancer) and her death, she and her older sister, Vicky, travelled on a moving and heart-breaking journey, its prime purpose being to ensure that Courtney had something to remember her mother by. She certainly has.

The One Life series is a perfect example of how television should deal with the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. In that, it puts the likes of Trisha Goddard to shame.

Finally, a mention in dispatches for two programmes that make Saturday nights worth staying in for.

They come, one after the other, on BBC2.

First, the utterly brilliant Soul Deep (BBC2, Saturday, 8.00pm) which says as much about the history of black oppression and civil rights in twentieth- century America as it does about the greatest music genre of our time. Last Saturday focused on Berry Gordy and Motown and how the Detroit-based label shrewdly attempted to (and successfully) create the kind of black music that could appeal equally to a white audience.

Tonight's programme - about Southern Soul and the legendary Memphis-based Stax records - should be equally unmissable.

Soul Deep was followed by Conviction (BBC2, Saturday, 9.00pm), the six-part cop drama first shown on BBC4. Edgy, thoughtful and intelligent, it boasts some excellent performances and a marvellously slowburning storyline.