How many television shows can one man host? And more to the point, how many of those can be on air at the same time?
About as many as there are hours in the day, apparently. In an entirely unscientific survey which involves surfing through the electronic programme guide on the PVR, I'm guessing Gordon Ramsay is winning this one hands-down at the moment.
There's Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (on two continents, with season two of the US version continuing week nights at 8.25pm), The F Word, Ramsay's Cookalong Live (currently in repeat mode) - all of which were screened in a marathon on BBC Lifestyle last Monday.
Ramsay, like many of his kitchen colleagues, has been the face of loads more shows, but for the purpose of this exercise, I'm more concerned with stuff that's on all at the same time and I'm not counting multiple seasons either.
Sean/Puff/P/Diddy/Daddy/ Combs, or whatever name he goes by this week, also has multiple shows, from Making His Band (Animax, Tuesdays at 7pm), to I Want to Work for Diddy (Vuzu, Mondays at 7.30pm) and P. Diddy's Starmaker (Vuzu, Tuesdays at 7.30pm).
The guys from Top Gear spread their love around too. besides The Hamster's previous Braniac hosting job, he's in something on National Geographic and James May has Toy Stories coming up on BBC Knowledge from Monday at 6.30pm. You'll also find him several times a day on Discovery World in James May's 20th Century.
Then over on BBC Knowledge, there is Professor Robert Winston. The Human Mind, Human Instinct, The Human Body and Child of Our Time are all on at the moment (multiple repeats) and last Sunday he popped up again in the three-part series The Story of God.
In fact, there was a glut of Christian-themed programming across the documentary channels, from biblical plagues and mysteries to biographies on Jesus Christ, what with it being Easter and all.
The only reason I know this is because the choices on the movie channels were bleak, forcing me to take my short attention span cruising through uncharted Sunday territory.
Anyway, I rather like the professor. He reminds me a bit of Kinky Friedman, minus the hunting vest and the Texan accent. But he has got the cookie-duster moustache. His subject matters are fascinating and he explains everything in terms anyone can understand.
It's good to know there are very primitive and basic reasons why we love to eat delicious, soft, sugar-coated doughnuts and piles of slap chips, that babies under six months have the ability to tell lemurs apart, and all the things that go on inside our bodies that make winning feel so damn good and losing the most miserable experience there is.
My favourite parts are when they do social experiments, whether they are with the group of children who are being documented from birth in a 20-year research project (Child of Our Time) or adults. Human beings make the best lab rats and results are often amusing and always interesting.
For example, an actress was told to go to a clothing shop and select outfits that were horribly unflattering. She then came out of the dressing room and asked strangers if they thought she looked good. The idea was to see if they would tell the truth or project the actress's perceived feelings back at her.
Every single one of them lied.
"She thinks she looks
nice so I thought it wasn't fair to tell her she didn't," said one woman in her defence. Rubbish! It's way more cruel to let people roam the world in ugly clothes and fat rolls, which is why they invented What Not to Wear and the red-carpet fashion police.
In one of the Child of Our Time episodes dealing with how much time kids spend in front of the telly, they say parents, especially working ones, don't mind this because they reckon their offspring learn more about the world that way.
Sure, they all could recognise the golden arches before they could read, but they'd do better to be tuning into the professor. I feel cleverer already.
SUNDAY
Kendra (E! Entertainment, 10pm): Oh yippee, Kendra and Hank are back. She can be as dumb as a box of rocks but she is bound to give me fodder for a future column and for that I applaud her. Get ready for the season premiere with an entire day of back-to-back re-runs, then see how Kendra tackles her post-pregnancy figure after giving birth to that freakishly large baby.
IN THE WEEK
Lost (M-Net Series, Monday at 8pm): Hmmm, well, I lost the plot of this series somewhere in the middle of season five after growing weary with trying to keep up with multiple layers and criss-crossing storylines even the creators can no longer stay on top of.
Unless I am absorbing knowledge from the likes of Professor Winston, I prefer my TV to be as mindless, low-maintenance and undemanding as possible. Remind me what happened last week, too, while you're at it, because I really couldn't be bothered trying to remember on my own.
So, this is the sixth and final season and we're seeing it while it's still running in the US, where it premiered in February and bows out at the end of next month.
If you've been otherwise occupied for the past few years, the season continues the stories of the survivors of the fictional 2004 crash of Oceanic Airlines flight 815 on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. To bring you up to speed there is a recap episode, and then the story will continue with the survivors dealing with two outcomes of the detonation of a nuclear bomb on the island in the 1970s. While the on-island story continues, "flash sideways" shows a second timeline, in which Flight 815 never crashes.
The core of the cast remains the same, but you can expect to see lots of dead people... Elizabeth Mitchell returns as fertility specialist Dr Juliet Burke; Dominic Monaghan (also in Flash Forward, M-Net on Tuesdays at 8.30pm) comes back as Charlie Pace; Jeremy Davies returns as deceased physicist Daniel Faraday and Ian Somerholder (also in Vampire Diaries, Vuzu on Mondays at 8.30pm) comes back as Boone Carlyle in several episodes.
Other faces we haven't seen for a while include Harold Perrineau (Michael Dawson), Cynthia Watros (Libby Smith), Emilie de Ravin as Claire Littleton and Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia Cortez.