I was awake quite late last night. So late, in fact, that by the time I got to sleep the birds were beginning an uneasy dawn chorus and a mass grave of moths had formed beneath my bedroom light. Keeping me company as I lay in bed on my laptop (well, in bed, working on my laptop, as opposed to lying on it) was Nash Bridges.

What a programme. This was the first time I have ever seen it - television in its true 1980s spirit, straight out of the Diagnosis Murder textbook for an engaging detective show with no characters, just hairstyles that talk. I am almost tempted to go in and ask for a Dick Van Dyke when I go to get mine cut this afternoon. Nash Bridges replaces good old Dick with a slightly younger model, and then adds the usual slightly improbable plot: on this occasion, a bomber had taken to hiding bombs in a variety of places which Nash then had to somehow defuse. At one stage this involved making bridges (how appropriate) with furniture to reach a woman in an office, then using a fire extinguisher to disarm a pressure-sensitive bomb strapped to the underside of her desk. I bet every officer has a story like that to tell.

The problem is, television like this no longer gets made. For a start hairstyles like that just don't exist any more, and now it's all about organised terrorism, or it's a docu-soap about the local police force and how they go round re-uniting kittens with worried families... there's more 'MI5, not 9 to 5' and less 'guy working with a loveable sidekick in a really cool car, nailing the bad boys'. And that can't be good.

Take, for example, Starsky and Hutch. I've never seen an episode, and frankly I will not rest until I do. Having played the Starsky and Hutch game, it is obvious that this must have been a lot of fun to watch, but can I find a single Sky channel showing the damn thing? No. We're stuck with Pop Idol Extra every night instead of some quality programming. People complain that we show too many repeats, but when they're like Diagnosis Murder, Nash Bridges and even Murder, She Wrote, how can you complain?

Whilst I'm on the subject of classic television, Channel 4 continue to go up in my estimation for showing wonderful old films every afternoon. A few weeks ago I caught 'It's Great To Be Young', a wonderful 50s tale of a teacher at an exclusive boarding school, and a few days ago I had the pleasure of watching the 1950s 'Moulin Rouge', the biopic of the artists Toulouse-Lautrec, as I worked. It was exquisitely filmed, the acting was superb and the dialogue absolutely hilarious in between moments of despair. If we got rid of wastes of space like shows about package holidays, that new show where one family become servants to the other, the totally irrelevant Big Brother US and others, and replaced them with a blend of Starsky and Hutch and 1950s films, I think the programming schedule would be complete.