Spot the difference: Prime Suspect, CSI, Cracker, Silent Witness, Heartbeat, The Case of Madeleine McCann.
Tricky, isn't it? They all concern the detection of crime and the unmasking of the culprit. They all feature dramatic plot twists, false leads and various manifestations of human frailty.
All right, I'll give you a clue. If you ring 999 and say you want to speak to a detective about one, or all, of the first five subjects listed above you may get laughed at or could find yourself being arrested for wasting police time.
That is because everything except The Case of Madeleine McCann is a work of fiction. The storylines featured in Prime Suspect and the rest have never happened; all made up, every single one of them. I recall an episode of Cracker was set against the backdrop of the Hillsborough disaster but thankfully the drama itself, brilliantly conceived as it was, was pure, gritty make-believe.
I flag up these discrepancies between fiction and fact because you, like me, may have despaired at the way the disappearance on holiday of a young girl has been covered by the media.
The robust viewing figures for TV's DIY whodunits, jazzed up as they are with cool music, brooding stars and razzle-dazzle forensic technology, must have prompted news chiefs to ape such dramatic treatments of real-life events in order to boost viewing figures and bolster their own positions.
The way developments in the case of Madeleine McCann have been covered, particularly by the TV news channels, must be one of the most unedifying spectacles in the history of unedifying news spectacles. Because that is what the terrible abduction and/or killing of a little girl has become - a spectacle.
Madeleine has been missing since May 3 when she apparently disappeared from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal. A version of the story is well documented: the child's last known reported words of "Mummy, I've had the best day ever"; the naming of a British man as an official suspect; the treatment of the crime scene as a public thoroughfare; the discovery of "significant" DNA evidence and its examination in Birmingham, and the declaration that Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry, are being treated as official suspects.
In times not so far distant, this would have been enough. But now, in order to fill news managers' insatiable demands for "BREAKING NEWS " we find ourselves in the ridiculous position of having reporters fill the information vacuum with amateur sleuthing and crackpot theorising. Retired members of The Sweeney crop up to throw in their "expert comment" in a vain attempt to give the roving Miss Marples a semblance of credibility.
The McCanns' return from Portugal to Rothley in Leicestershire on Sunday was treated like a UK version of the OJ Simpson chase fiasco, the couple's every move tracked by photographers on motorbikes as jeeps packed with camera crews used Dukes of Hazard driving techniques to keep up. All the while media helicopters buzzed the sky broadcasting the "latest live images".
The BBC used surely some of the most intrusive zoom pictures ever broadcast of a distraught mother, for, suspect or not, that is what Kate McCann is. A lens was trained on her thin face as her husband made a statement on the runway (the runway!) of East Midlands Airport. Every flicker of her eyelids was monitored as the camera roamed voyeuristically, hoping and praying for a tear.
It all makes you long for the days when notions of restraint and decency were valued.