Not made in Scotland: The Scottish Broadcasting Commission has canvassed more than a thousand Scots on how they regard the indigenous gogglebox. They weren’t impressed, it seems, because only 5% of the stuff appearing on BBC1 and BBC2 is made in Scotland.

“People are expressing a desire and appetite to see more programming of documentaries, history and heritage programmes,” said Blair Jenkins, chairman of the commission. “People didn’t feel the full diversity of life in Scotland was being reflected in their programmes.”

The BBC, though, fought back:

“The report is very selective in its observations,” said Donalda MacKinnon, BBC Scotland’s head of programmes. “We believe it does not give a fair reflection of the quality and range of productions from BBC Scotland teams.”

Bad news, Donalda: it does. Your comedy shows are gibberish targeted at cab drivers in Fife who’ve recently sustained a mild head injury, your documentaries are campy chronologies of Caledonian kitsch, and you continue to employ the agonisingly smug newsreader David Robertson despite the concerted efforts of vigilante groups to discover his home address. If you require further confirmation, peruse this leaked memo detailing some future BBC Scotland productions.

Pipe Dreams: Sparkling new comedy series in which Sanjeev Kohli and Ford Kiernan play a pair of wacky sewage workers in Dunfermline. When Ford drops his packed lunch in Tunnel B on the day his boss is coming for dinner, the scene is set for some bad mix-ups with hilarious consequences!

The Secret, Shocking History of The People’s Friend: Karen Dunbar narrates this documentary look at the couthy, much-loved magazine. Widely seen as a delightful diversion for readers of a certain age, Dunbar reveals a different, bloodier story entirely. “There were all kinds of cover-ups,” she says. “In 1952, they misspelled the word orthopaedic, for instance. A picture of Molly Weir was captioned as being Una McLean. The public doesn’t know the half of it, so they don’t . . .”

In bingo we trust: Like colorectal surgery and how to operate as a professional hitman, the game of bingo is one of those things most of us would prefer to know nothing of. It lives in its own dark realm of oddness, a Stygian landscape of obscurity presided over by giant marker pens and post-menopausal knitwear. Which is just as well, really: to watch female family members — usually older, usually obsessed to the point of psychiatric concern with Tom Jones — playing bingo is somewhat like discovering they have a secret life tearing the heads from oxen; they are so ferocious and focused and so unlike the placid old biddies we’re accustomed to seeing swoon over Daniel O’Donnell.

Quite why this rather ponderous game of slow-motion snap excites the granny classes so profoundly I am not qualified to say; I can merely point out that bingo is ruled by a code of honour and propriety that non-initiates mock at their peril.

Further evidence of this was provided this week with the news that Soraya Lowell, an office cleaner from Hamilton, has elected to give half a £1.2m bingo prize to her playing partner, Agnes O’Neill. “There would have been no hard feelings if she had decided not to split the money,” claimed O’Neill, while arranging to have her walking stick platinum-plated. “I would have understood.”

This is generous, given that so few of the rest of us do. We would have given the old dear a marker pen the size of Apollo 11 and that would have been an end to it. But this would have been short-sighted. As someone who spent his teenage years squiring his grandmother to grubbily cancerous bingo halls in London, I can reveal that no obligation, no trust, no article of faith is taken so seriously as the understanding that bingo players share their winnings with colleagues. These people are tenacious enough to make the mafia look like hungover chemistry students. Had Lowell kept her lucre, her name, and those of her descendants’ descendants, would have been mud.

Liz runs away with herself: Perhaps one of the greatest travesties of our society is the prevalence in its public arena of sport. It is on our news broadcasts, on the back pages of our newspapers, it brings the television schedules and public thoroughfares to grinding halts, and all for no reason more substantial than the satisfaction of an atavistic, neanderthal impulse.

As T S Eliot noted, sport is objectionable because it’s about nothing other than itself, it makes no reference to the wider human realm, it just goes on for ever in a ceaseless, irresolvable series of victories and defeats, triumphs and tragedies.

Sport teaches us only about sport, something evident in the profound inarticulacy of those who comment on it professionally. Even on a good night Scotsport reminds you of those million chimps struggling to write Shakespeare.

Yet sport takes up a vast tranche of the public discourse. That reliable old slogger Liz McColgan added to it this week, with a well-rehearsed injunction that all of us should be exercising all the time otherwise we will die looking like Oliver Hardy. The former Olympic-medal-winning runner was hoiked in to advise the parliamentary enquiry Pathways into Sport that athletics coaches should be sent to nursery schools to combat obesity among the nippers.

Quizzed on what she would have done had she not put on the Lycra shorts, McColgan replied: “I would be on the dole, smoking and drinking: that’s the life I came from. I’ve still got family members in that lifestyle and I was lucky I chose a different path.” So have I, love; the difference is I didn’t fall for the Scientology of jogging and the misapprehension that kids should have their brains in their ankles.