THIS Is Your Life has been cancelled after 48 years, we reported yesterday. Forty-eight years? It should have gone after 48 hours.

This festival of fawning has never done much more than offer a weekly workout for viewers' bile ducts. The first programme, broadcast in 1955, should have killed the show dead.

Host of the US version, Ralph Edwards, was flown over to launch the series. Hilariously, the Daily Sketch spoilt everything by revealing the first guest was to be footballer Stanley Matthews, so the producers looked around for another star.

Who did they choose?

Eamonn Andrews, the man signed up to anchor the rest of the British series. Proof that an imagination is surplus to requirements in television.

This Is Your Life has stuck to this mindless standard ever since. The format never changed, even as the Beeb and ITV kept chucking it to one another as if it were a rancid potato.

For each show, all you needed was a schlock-jockey host who could read words of up to three syllables, a lower league celebrity for your subject, a Saddam Hussein-sized photograph of him, a six-pack of shop-soiled celebrity "mates", one or two ordinary people with stutters to emphasise the star quality of everyone else, and the subject's present family (ex wife and neglected kids strictly not welcome).

Then the dishonesty crept in. This Is Your Life? No it wasn't. It never mentioned the wife-beating allegations, or the treatment for horse medicine addiction; the nervous breakdowns which saw the subject abusing frozen chickens in the Co-op soon after his ITV teatime show was axed; the dead man pulled from the swimming pool or the attempted bribery of a paramedic shortly afterwards.

Instead we endured 30 minutes of sickly sentimental half-truths which made Hello! magazine look like World In Action. Chuck in a cute granddaughter at the end - "You thought little Bluebell Apricot Pixietoes was asleep in her cot..." - and we were all left with a lump in our throats. At least until we could make it to the bathroom.

Now This Is Your Life is to go from our screens, perhaps TV bosses will finally twig an obvious truth. Just because something has been on our screens for years doesn't mean it is good. "Enduring classics" are usually something we endure.

If there is a more mawkish, witless, clich-ridden, dreary, characterless pile of stale horse claptrap than Last Of The Summer Wine, then I have yet to encounter it. Yet it has been stinking up the schedules for 30 years. Get rid of it before another generation has to suffer like mine.

While we're at it, plans for a revamped version of Top Of The Pops have been presented to the music industry. It will be called, with fantastic originality, All New Top Of The Pops. Here's a better idea: make it Top Of The Stops. Bin it. It has as much relevance to today's youth culture as an ex-Pans Person's varicose veins.

ITV, meanwhile, is to get a new boss. Here's my memo to him. Step one, cut out Calendar and all the other regional news shows. No one cares about artificial TV-land regions. Why should people in York give a stuff about a petition to save a Worksop milk round?

Step two, get rid of News At Ten. People with the attention span of a gnat don't deserve their own news show. And just because Trevor McDonald can read words out loud without running his finger along the autocue does not make him a national treasure.

Updated: 12:12 Wednesday, October 22, 2003