But Lizzie, the problem is that your perception of "base and crude" material may be relatively mild to someone else. And it's when we start legislating for the taste and boundaries of others that we find ourselves in trouble.

To be honest, there's a lot that you and I would agree on. Stuff I've complained about in the past includes the marketing of Playboy merchandise to children, the positioning of soft porn men's mags at the tills in WH Smith where they are at a child's-eye level, teenage magazines which discuss sex, and the marketing of age-inappropriate clothes and makeup to pre-teen girls. Like you, I believe all of this stuff contributes to the problems we have in society.

I think that where we differ is that while I object to things being directly marketed to children, or put in the way of them going about their daily business, I think that the content of programmes that are directly marketed to adults, so long as they are broadcast at appropriate times, should be largely uncensored. At some point, parents themselves have to take responsibility for what their kids watch, read and how they spend their free time. If the internet and the television have become babysitters, this is more to do with lazy parenting than it is with the content itself. You can watch TV with your kids; you can even filter out what they can and can't see on the internet. You can refuse to give them a computer or a TV in their bedroom. But if parents can't be bothered to do these things, whise fault is it when they get hold of inappropriate content?

At the end of the day, we as adults have a choice in what we watch and listen to - if there's something you don't like, you can turn it off. That way the people who do like it aren't forced to live by your standards. But the responsibilities of good parenting are really, I feel, another matter, and it would be a bit daft if all the TV and radio in the world was only suitable for an audience of under-12s.