I was watching an episode of South Park this week, as I do from time to time to keep in touch with the youth market, when I became mightily confused. It was not merely that I had lost track of the plot, or that I had tried to take a sip without removing the lid of the hot-water bottle, or that I have been spending far too much time lately idly chewing aluminium foil - no, no, it was a cognitive wrench more unsettling than that.

Just as one of those kids - you'll know better than I which one; all kids look the same to me - was about to offer a shrill, broken-voiced denunciation of TV medium John Edwards ("You know what the problem is with John Edwards? He's a..."), the picture on the screen cut to an image of a bakkie driving down a dirt road in rural South Africa. "Strange," I thought. "It's a quantum leap forward in animation technology, but it's an odd edit, and I had no idea South Park is set in Mpumalanga. Cor. Just goes to show you."

But as the plot unfolded, I noticed how strangely reminiscent it was of a local advertisement for a well-known brand of a rugged delivery vehicle. That scene was followed by another bearing a distinct similarity to still another local ad. What gives? I thought. And then, as quickly as they had come, like great hovering saucers of light above a lonely highway in the American Midwest, they vanished.

"... Douchebag!" said one of the kids on South Park.

I was disturbed and disoriented - these quick changes, the sudden shift of paradigm, my attention span is simply too long to cope with it. Over time I realised what it was all about. M-Net has, this past week and more, dispensed with, not only its continuity announcers, but even the show idents that mark when an ad break is coming and when it is over.

I am only thankful my father is not around to see it. Back in the late 1970s when we spent holidays in Zimbabwe, as it is now, visiting my aunt and uncle, he would rage incessantly at the television. They had better programmes than we did, because they had no Equity ban, but the ad breaks roused my dad to a fury unprecedented since Carter was elected American president. "They just come in the middle of the programme!" he still fumed, long after we had passed Beit Bridge and were back in the land of Riaan Cruywagen and Wielie Walie. "No warning! I'm telling you, that country is headed to wrack and ruin!"

This latest development is sad, in a way. I have always been weirdly fond of continuity announcers, with the obvious exception of that shower of Simunye dunderheads, who couldn't even manufacture continuity in their own sentences, let alone between programmes. Continuity announcers were our first local TV celebrities - I remember the days when the mailbags of Dorianne Berry and Yvonne Banning would groan under the weight of fan mail. Now that I think about it, I was baptised by a continuity announcer. Not actually, of course, I think they had an officer of the church to work the water, but my baptism photographs show me happily if chubbily nestled in the arms of Yvonne Banning, then my sister-in-law. So the glamour of the continuity announcer was in my blood from an early age, but now the species is in sad decline.

The irony is that the M-Net announcers were pretty much the best of the modern bunch, always professional, always speaking speakable scripts. I was downright fond of Ashley Hayden, Peter Ndoro, Marius Roberts; they had a glamour and a presence bigger than their actual jobs. By contrast, over on SABC3, despite having worked the Monday shift for a mighty long time, that quasi-Australian Irene Bester still manages to pronounce Frazier as "Fray-zee-a", rather than "Fray-zha". I don't get it. Do the station executives not watch her? None of her friends? Has no one ever set himself or herself the task of correctly pronouncing "Frasier" in front of her until she takes the tip?

Meanwhile, still greater mysteries were being explored on The Day Reagan Was Shot (M-Net, Monday 8pm). Produced by Oliver Stone, the show was a dramatised recreation of the behind-scenes drama on the day that John Hinckley shot the American president. "What if there is an international crisis while he's under anaesthetic?" demanded a character, which puzzled me. Knowing what we know of Reagan, I would have thought the biggest danger would have been an international crisis while he was awake.

Not so, apparently. Allegedly true to history, which in the hands of Oliver Stone may or may not mean that it really happened, the show offered an astonishing insight into the squabbles, rivalries, power struggles and blundering hamfistedness unleashed upon the corridors of power while Reagan lay on the operating table.

Structured around the ego battle between Casper Weinberger and Alexander Haig, the secretary of state, (played by a red-faced and admirably splenetic Richard Dreyfuss), the show unveiled a litany of almost unbelievable incompetence - telephone lines to the Kremlin were down, no one had a copy of the constitution to determine the succession of power, no one could find the man with the missile-launch briefcase in case the need arose for a retaliatory strike against the Soviets, and on and on. It was a bit like a Marx Brothers movie - a seemingly unstoppable influx of fat white men in suits cramming into the Situation Room, reading the instruction manual for the missile-launch system, shouting "Hello? Hello?" into the red telephone handsets.

It was funny, in a scary sort of way, and entirely gripping even though you knew how it ended, and one more proof, if proof be needed, that we need not fear conspiracy theories. The people in power scarcely know how to order a pizza in concert, let alone secretly run the world.