Michele Hewitson: Curling cool and inoffensive

Curling. Now there's a nice, non-offensive, family-friendly spot of telly viewing.

I have enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics. Yes, even the curling, which, had you suggested in advance I might spend quite a bit of time on the couch watching, would probably have caused my lip to do its own spot of curling up at the edge.

Well, it is odd, isn't it? Especially in the context of the Winter Olympics which is, except for the drudgery of cross-country skiing (and they say golf is a good walk ruined), all about being higher, faster, zanier, more daring than the last nut to do the luge. Or that bonkers skiing up the slope thing without skis, then doing quadruple backward flips with your ankles crossed. Something like that. It happens so fast it's hard to see.

But curling is the sedate sport. Despite the frantic sweeping on the ice, the stone makes its languid way down to what looks like a giant bull's-eye. I have no idea of the rules, but it was nice to watch, in a lazy sort of way.

I also have an inexplicable passion for watching the ice skating. Not the speed stuff, which is just daft outfits out of some bad sci-fi movie, but the pretty, twirling girls who go round and round in sparkling sequins and trashy-looking little frocks like ballerinas on music boxes. And they do it on ice! Amazing that. And they all look like such nice girls.

Admittedly, it was more fun when you had bad girl Tonya Harding, with her tears and running mascara and her mad, out of control plotting and hating. But still, the girls make it look so easy, you think, oh I could dance on ice like that.

This is nonsense, of course, but surely anyone could be a brake.

This is the term for the heftier types who act as just that in those peculiar adaptations of the sleigh as they hurl down an icy track at speeds over 100km/h.

A brake would be a good thing to aspire to. It's a great job title, for one thing. For another, surely the more you eat the better. It's a nice thing when telly is aspirational.

It's a nice thing when telly is nice. There's far too much of that nasty, offensive stuff on the telly.

I'm not about to bang on about THAT apparently offensive telly episode other than to say: If an apparently offensive telly episode screens in a forest and nobody watches it, is it still offensive?

I'm offended every time I see that stupid and sexist ad involving trolley dollies and a flight safety sequence in which one of said dollies removes her bra.

Or the one where the in-flight entertainment involves two sheilas in very short uniforms spanking each other. How dreary. What's it for anyway? Deodorant? It stinks.

So I'm highly offended by that ad. I change the channel whenever it comes on.

Something else that pongs is something called How Clean is Your House? If I wanted to watch filthy people live in squalor I'd go back flatting. I watched one episode just so I could get well and truly offended. I was. So now I don't watch it.

I've never watched a thing called Shock Treatment although I've seen a promo which seemed to be suggesting that Mikey Havoc would be getting an enema. No doubt there are some people who would think that there could be no more deserving person, but I didn't want to watch it.

I'm offended by the title, although I might watch if any of the attention-seeking types who constitute this country's dreary roster of celebs were actually given shock treatment. But that really would be offensive. Wouldn't it?