"They said" is a phrase people use in order to repeat - or make credible their own invention of - some nasty piece of gossip.

Recently, that phrase was used to insinuate that a mega bust-up had taken place between Fabrizio Faniello and Ira Losco... at which, most people commented that they hadn't even known these two singers had been an 'item' in the first place.

It all boiled down to a particularly nifty advertising video for PS2 by Forestals, which incredible as it may seen, has not yet made it to television, unlike the adverts by local personalities for McDonald's ["I'm lovin' it"].

Something that amazingly did, however, was the Smash Television Christmas Eve teleshopping slot; not that there is anything new in this type of bombardment by that particular station. But unless it was a very elaborate joke, it deserves the Bleak House Award of the Year.

The person flogging a newfangled type of neon tube appeared too tired to know - or care - that he was on camera. In between paragraphs of sales pitch, he kept clapping his hands loudly and yelling at someone to 'take it away' ghax qed jittikani. Moreover, he then promised deliveries on Christmas Day - after telling us that it would be a day of rest.

Something else which ought never to have seen the light of day, let alone a television camera, is the game show Vlegga u Salib, which mainly consists of guys and gals battling it out (so much for New Man and Liberated Woman) in parlour games, interspersed with entertainment and flexing of well-toned and oiled muscles of people who, one notes, are not contesting in any of the games but have been invited to form part of the body (!) of extras.

The whole set-up is just as if someone were let loose with a camera during a private party; almost as annoying as the fact that those who send in messages that will appear onscreen don't realise, or care, that it's rude to use capital letters.

A quick head count gave me seven, indicating that this was an episode (Super One, Christmas Day) from when the manufactured pop group S Club still had that number of members, and therefore the digit in the name.

The storyline had them through a wormhole (a time warp), back to 1959, and stopping at Tensville. Before storing out their time-space continuum, of course, they did at least two Sarah Harrison dance routines, stopped the feud between two (oldie) rivals in love who hadn't spoken to one another for nighon a quarter of a century, saved a boy from dying (they showed him the newspaper of the day after his would-be fatal accident, and thus he changed his mind about the stock-car race), and changed the local eatery into their namesake of the Gateway Diner type.

That wasn't the only déjà-vu about it all; this episode had already been shown way back; I was under the impression that television stations scrape the bottom of the barrel ('nobody watches television') only in summer.

TVM, on the other hand, decided to tug at the heartstrings and showed The Christmas Shoes, about a young mother with heart disease (she was a candidate for a transplant but the heart that was made available was tainted with Hepatitis B) whose son bought the eponymous shoes from the money he saved through collecting recyclable aluminum soft drinks and beer cans.

Told like that, it does not sound at all poignant; but throw in a workaholic, his frustrated wife and daughter, a disappointed elderly mother, the sick woman's music class practising for the forthcoming concert (which eventually transmogrified into street carol-singing so that the workaholic could hear the tunes from his office and the dying lady ditto from her Christmas-light bedecked bed), an environmental crisis, and other minor details, and you have the film not to watch during what ought to be a happy family gathering. Incidentally, the boy gives his mother the embroidered red footwear just before she dies (on Christmas Eve).

Who has the final say in what appears on television stations on red-letter days like Christmas and Easter? Is the choice up to one person, or is it the work of a committee?

Around this time, most schedules are coming to an end. But there is one programme which must go on and on, seeing that PBS literally holds the keys to the nation's broadcasting archives, was announced as having 'ended' last Tuesday.

Tezori, the unique opus by Charles Abela Mizzi, presented by Anna Bonanno, has over the last schedule been giving us different 'angles', so to speak, of our country's history, but nowhere near all of it.

It is a pity if this were the only set of programmes to be produced; I am sure there is much material where that came from.

Another series that has come to an end is the (really) satirical Kaktus, (but you can buy the Rizzi Band CD; there's nothing like a spot of merchandising to achieve fame lasting longer than the archetypal 15 minutes' worth. Not as upfront as Jay Leno's nasty jokes about people in the news, but it'll do for the nonce.

My guess is that this series will be repeated come summer (this is one thing 'everybody' will watch) because it tackled such sacred cows as religion, illegal (Caucasian) immigrants, education and road rage with the verve and wit (and courage) inexistent elsewhere.

The best anti-misbehaviour clip I have seen was shown on RAI Uno. Whereas 'we' could only come up with a few notes of the overused Dido record and a heartfelt message, 'they' had a posse of Carabinieri conducting a night raid on a hangar.

Inside, nothing illegal was taking place; there was just a band practising, and so there came the chance for the pun-punchline to be used. "Let all our seasonal botti ("hits", referring to both car crashes and illegal fireworks) be of this type" it went.