And so with the above fairly-laboured title, we're off on a brand new series of adventures. Or something...

We rarely buy a newspaper here at Curnow Towers, and in fact the only occasion when we do is if we're going on a lengthy car journey. In those instances we tend to buy one for Miss Curnow in the back seat. I don't mean that we give it to her to read (having grown out of travel scrabble she's now onto the financial section of the Telegraph, no no no) but rather as a preventative measure against car sickness. When I was little I similarly used to suffer from travel sickness, and I recall that the night before Mum would always give me some pill to prevent it - I don't, in all honesty, remember any long journeys where I didn't feel sick, though, so I'm rather dubious now as to whether they worked or not. Given that fact, and given that those little plastic cables that used to dangle from the back of cars in the 1980s have gone out of fashion over the past decade or so, we had up until recently been fitting Little Miss with travel bands. These are the ones that look like wristbands (another 80s fad which appears to have gone with the wind, or at least the shoulder pads and the kids from fame) but which have a plastic button on the inside. When the band is put on the wrist in just the right place, this button applies pressure to a specific point on the wrist, and thus wards off car sickness.

However, even the vaguely-alternative wristbands have now gone by the board, and our current favoured method for the prevention of travel sickness is to sit Miss Curnow on a sheet or two of newspaper. Before you reach for the Yellow Pages, wondering which section 'Men in White Coats' would come under, let me readily admit that I have no idea how this works, only that (so far at least) it does. We first learnt the secret from one of our daughter's teachers, who prescribed a sheet of paper to each bottom on one of their school trips. At first I suspected it was simply psychological, a placebo, something that works because you think it will work... but the fact that apparently not one of the children on the bus even complained of feeling sick does tend to weigh against that suggestion I think. Certainly, on any sizeable journey since then, we have found it to be entirely successful with our Little Miss. Yesterday we went all the way to deepest, darkest Cornwall and back on half a tank of petrol and four pages from the Daily Mail, without even a hint of nausea.

But to return to the newspapers that we oh-so rarely buy, I did happen to get an edition over Christmas which included the usual 'TV round-up'. Specifically, it was a piece on the Christmas Day ratings, which are down on previous years apparently, and listing the top rating shows. The top slot, incidentally, was "EastEnders" and although I didn't see it, I'm willing to stick my neck out and take a wild guess that it was a depressing episode in which a mixture of depressingly grim and unrealistically chirpy Cockney sparrahs had a generally depressing (and quite possibly highly improbable) time of it. For a change.

The second slot, which is a fact even more depressing than "EastEnders" was the Christmas Day edition of "The Vicar of Dibley". I have a problem with "The Vicar of Dibley", in that it's just nowhere near as good as (a) it should be; (b) it could be; and (c) the media tries to convince us it is. Its inclusion in the shortlist for last year's Best British Sitcom (I believe it actually ended up third!) was, to use an entirely inappropriate word, laughable. So much of it is abysmally dire, lamely written, lazily played, dreadfully plodding, and if it were all like that I could cheerfully dislike it, without any trouble whatsoever. No, my problem is that just occasionally it absolutely shines, making it so much harder to completely dismiss. I don't just mean the brief attempts at genuine pathos (most famously Gary Waldhorn superbly delivering the single word "Stay" at the end of one episode) which in all honesty are generally undermined by being so much at odds with the style of the show - real emotion at the death of Mrs Cropley is all well and good, but it sits uncomfortably with the show's Goonified image of a picturesque village where the milkman delivers literally straight from the cow, and where one of the members of the parish council readily admits to having sex with animals.

But even though the performances generally make the occasional emotional interlude at least reasonably effective, where "The Vicar of Dibley" really shines is in the occasional moment of comic genius. Although most of the time I find that the series wavers between OK, and Oh Dear, with wide patches of So-So in-between, it has been known to produce the odd gem. One of my absolute all-time favourite sitcom moments ever stems from the episode where Frank Pickle starts his night-time show on Radio Dibley with the words, "I first discovered I was gay..." It works so brilliantly because not only is it unexpected, but it is also fully exploited, being followed by a scene where everybody congratulates Frank on a marvellous show, before revealing (to the audience at least) that none of them actually heard it!

That's the quality of material that "The Vicar of Dibley" should be full to overflowing with, but it lamentably isn't. I don't often make predictions, or at least not very accurate ones - during the 3 year period between "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" I was absolutely convinced that Admiral Piett was "the other" that Yoda referred to - but when I learnt that there was a new, Christmas Day episode of "The Vicar of Dibley" in the offing I predicted that it would get a lot of publicity, and a lot of ratings, but would be very poor, and I think (whether through a burgeoning precognisance, or simply because by the law of averages I'm bound to be right some time) I pretty much nailed it with that one.

To be honest, the Christmas episode was probably the worst one they'd ever done (proof that it's not always wise to bring back retired sitcoms for a Christmas special - a lesson the BBC should surely have learned with "Only Fools and Horses" over the past few years). For one thing, it was almost (although I hesitate to use the word) blasphemous. I know that sounds rather extreme, but I'm sure I can't have been the only viewer squirming in discomfort during the scenes where the villagers are trying out some new, self-penned carols - the winner being Jim "No no no no no no no" Trott's effort, about Jesus coming down the birth canal. The last time Dibley gave us Christmas, David Horton suggested that they try and make King Herod a more sympathetic character in the nativity (to those unfamiliar with the story, that's King "Kill the firstborn" Herod), and that was funny. But this time around I really did feel that it had overstepped the mark, and I suspect that the trendy vicar who was one of the talking heads on UK Gold's recent celebration of 10 years of the show, was feeling rather embarrassed come Boxing Day.

What makes it worse is that whichever hat the BBC was wearing, it ought to have vetoed the 'new carol' scenes. Even if it's not currently trendy at Ms Beeb to consider religious sensitivities (unless, obviously, it's a religion that might object loudly) those scenes also committed the cardinal sin of just not being very funny. So either way they shouldn't have been in a Christmas Day sitcom. Without wishing to be all gossipy (well, not much) I notice that the script editor for "The Vicar of Dibley" is Emma Freud, who if I'm not very much mistaken is the wife of writer Richard Curtis, so whether she didn't really apply a very objective eye to the scripts, I don't know...

Mind you, to be fair, it would probably be pretty daunting for anybody to have to return scripts to Richard Curtis with the words "NOT FUNNY" written on them. And in a sense, "The Vicar of Dibley" is an oddly slapdash entry on that man's CV. This is the man who wrote "Four Weddings and a Funeral", one of the most successful British films ever (and the one which single-handedly turned Hugh Grant into a bankable star); the man who wrote "Notting Hill" and most recently "Love Actually". Even if that last one had its fair share of detractors, and although I haven't seen it it does seem to be very much one of those films that you either love or hate (actually)-- even allowing for its less than unanimous reviews, it was still a very successful film. He was involved with the screenplays for both Bridget Jones movies. He was also, of course, co-author of the various series of Blackadder - this is the man who in the final episode of "Blackadder Goes Forth" wrote one of the finest half hour shows television has ever produced.

And yet, he is also the man who appears to have adopted an "ah, bung it in, anything will do" attitude to "The Vicar of Dibley". The intended visual highlight of the Christmas episode reads like the sort of idea an eight year old would have come up with for 'a funny programme': Well, first, right, they give the Vicar a really big chocolate fountain, right, and then, like, she dives in it, and then, yeah, the Bishop turns up, and she's, like, really embarrassed... Her and the audience both, alas.

But talk of the Bishop brings me staggering back to the point, which wasn't actually an attack on "The Vicar of Dibley" at all. The newspaper piece which I referred to what seems like hours ago now, went on to mention, in its final paragraph that the Church of England objected to the main Christmas Day movie being... "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"!

Now, I will grant you that newspapers like to take things out of context wherever possible (I believe it's the policy of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story) and the Daily Mail in particular seems to enjoy printing the sort of story that makes one rage against the world. In the same edition, there was an attempt to convince us all of the hell of shopping on the internet, with a piece about hundreds (they might even have said thousands, but don't quote me, or if you do don't name your source) of people who bought Christmas presents online, only for them not to turn up.

I'm not saying that there weren't some people who had that experience, I'm sure there were, but I have to say that I bought all Mrs C's presents online, and she did the same with my beloved "Lost in Time" DVD, and they all turned up within a day or two of being ordered. Even more impressive, my father-in-law ordered three things for my mother-in-law online. He placed the orders on Tuesday 21st, which was (as all three email confirmations were at pains to point out) past the last guaranteed delivery date for Christmas. Nevertheless, two of the three turned up on Thursday 23rd, with the remaining one arriving in the post on Christmas Eve. Yes, there are bound to be some people whose items did not arrive... but then, if a million people went into Marks & Spencer and bought presents, you can guarantee that some of those would be faulty or defective in some way. And besides, the press seem at times so determined to get a story, I wouldn't be overly surprised to learn that the people interviewed for the piece had ordered their presents on 23rd, expecting them to appear by magic the next day, before then complaining loudly when they didn't.

So given that Fleet Street (or is it Wapping now, I seem to have lost track) is not necessarily a wholly reliable source, it's possible that the Church's objection to Harry Potter may have been overstated, misrepresented, or just plain wrong. Perhaps the Church sent the BBC an official letter enumerating all the Christmas programming to which it objected (goats being sacrificed on Songs of Praise, two separate uses of the F- word in the Christmas edition of the Teletubbies) and then added, as a final note, that they didn't much care for Harry Potter either. It could even have been an unofficial objection, by a solitary vicar nattering to the editor of the Mail after a carol service. I almost hope so, because it really would alarm and depress me, if the biggest objection that the Church of England had to Christmas TV was that "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was shown on Christmas Day.

For one thing, it would suggest either that whoever objected hadn't read it (which would be an appalling instance of making a case without being acquainted with the facts) or alternatively, that they had read it but had missed the point entirely (and considering that the Church is in a position of some responsibility and leadership, moral leadership at that, this would be really quite alarming). The objection, from whatever source, official or not, is of course due to the whole 'witchcraft' issue, which I have to say I find laughable in the extreme. Harry Potter is no more about witchcraft than "Star Wars" is about the Apollo space program.

Yes, I know that Harry and co attend the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but I'm fairly sure that this is a fairytale style vision of witches and the like. I just can't imagine that any real person calling themselves a witch prances around using a wooden wand forged with a phoenix's tail feather, using easily understandable spells such as Expeliarmus (to EXPEL something) or Leviosa (to make something LEVItate - do you see now?). Just as the spaceships and robots and other worlds in "Star Wars" are just the window-dressing for the story, so too the magical world of Harry Potter is just the background.

If anything, the Church ought to applaud the Potter books, because (actually, very like "Star Wars" the more I think of it) it is in essence an extremely moral story of Good versus Evil, in which (so far at least, although I admit I've only read the first four books) honesty, and integrity, and friendship, and loyalty, and fairplay, and GOOD, triumph over Evil. It's also a story about redemption and forgiveness - grim and moody Professor Snape, I've learnt during the fourth book, was once on the side of Lord Voldemort (or 'The Dark Side' if you like) but has turned from that path - the Ben Kenobi figure of Albus Dumbledore has given him a second chance. I would have thought that particular character subplot, of Snape becoming a good guy again after hearing the cock crow three times, would be right up the Church's street.

These are old story-telling attributes, perhaps the oldest and most fundamental, and it's no more wicked to show/read the Harry Potter stories to a child (or even better, to make them read them for themselves) than it is to tell them the story of Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty. If anything, the dodgiest story to tell a child is Goldilocks - because she gets away with it, and the bears are left with a wrecked house. What's the moral of that one then - if you're going to steal porridge and vandalise houses, make sure you can outrun the owners?

Children deal in absolutes, in black, white, good, evil, right, wrong. We all know that the world rather inconveniently can't very often be slotted into such discrete compartments, but it's a good place to start, a good basis for behaviour. No child is going to toy with a ouija board from watching "Harry Potter" whatever the Church might think.

And so with the above overlong ramble, we're off on a brand new series of complaining. Or something...