In La France Profonde no-one can hear you scream!

I'm sitting here on a windy, rainy night babysitting for the lovely guests in our cottage, Rob and Heather, and their gorgeous little girl Amélie.

Now before you start debating the relative merits of leaving your most precious possession with someone who regularly exposes herself to the local population, I should say that this is the first time ever I have babysat for any of our guests. Thing is, they are so lovely, and also expecting another baby and I know myself how precious time together is. So, here I am.

I've not really spent an evening in our cottage before and while I'm very used to all the creaks and groans and wildlife running about on the roof of our house, I'm not used to it here. Consequently I'm a nervous wreck! The rain is battering the roof, the wind is lifting the roof tiles and I'm sure I keep seeing someone looking through the windows out of the corner of my eye. Every few minutes I'm jumping out of my skin 'Wassat?', 'Wassat?'.

It's just occurred to me that..... in La France Profonde, no-one can hear you scream! (in a miracle of comic timing, Rob and Heather walked through the door at the exact moment I typed that resulting in my literally jumping a foot of the sofa. Rob professed it to be an impressive jump!)

I could be bludgeoned to death, chopped up into small pieces and fed to the chickens (mine having confirmed cannabalistic tendencies) and no-one would know.

Eventually when the children ran out of bread and cheese for their toasties they may possibly wonder where I am before returning to the computer/Wii/TV/reading a book.

The CH might eventually ask 'well where is Mum then?' but by that point I'll have been recycled by the chickens, probably in large blobs all over the terrace for prospective house buyers to slip over in.

Anyway, apart from angsting about whether or not I'm going to end up as a statistic (probably the only one actually) in the local crime survey, it's given me an opportunity to watch French TV.

We have UK TV in our house but we've never bothered to install a satellite dish at the cottage so it only has French TV.

Well, what a cultural feast I was rewarded with. I thought it would be hard to find worse TV than we have in the UK (except for anything the CH makes of course) but I can tell you, it won hands down.

I watched two episodes back to back of a CSI type copy which was so plagiarised as to be almost litigious then a bizarre thing called La Methode Cauet, a sort of poor man's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross but with a talentless bald man who's idea of 'funny' was to dress up as a woman and do an out of tune duet with the winner of Star Academy. Could this really be the same country that has the Académie Française to safeguard the French language and stop all these 'infernale' English words slipping in? Could it be the same country that produced Satre, Zola, Daudet and Molière? I think their problems lie much closer to home!

Even better, if you go onto the show's website you can leave a message. At the moment the only 'commentaire' is the address of a porn website!

But the worst thing was the colour of the guests. I've never seen so much orange in one room since the last X Factor auditions! And to make it worse, they sat with their backs to the audience who all looked to have the general pallor of microwaved sausages against their celebrity ubertans.

At one point I thought I might even have slipped through a gap in the space/time continuum and ended up in the 1980s such was the over application of hair gel by the men and the big hair of the women.

It was truly, truly awful but sadly like car crash TV so you just had to keep watching... and watch it I did!