THERE are so many programmes about food on television these days it's a wonder the set doesn't suffer from indigestion.

It's all rather odd when you think about it. For all the presenters and personalities, for all the recipes and tips, what you are basically doing is watching someone else eat. Salivating maybe as they try to explain the deliciousness of what they are gobbling.

Glancing down perhaps at your toast or your pot of dried noodles freshly reactivated by the kettle (the last of these is, in my case, a purely hypothetical example; the first rather less so). Eating something but not what they are eating. Or not eating at all while they froth at the mouth with calorific adjectives.

Vicarious is the word for it, perhaps, in that you are living through someone else's experience. In this food programmes are a little like pornography, as has been said before. Not that I am any sort of an expert on that. But food programmes, oh that's a different kettle of line-caught sea bass altogether.

I have watched them all, more or less. Hands-off Delia and hands-on Nigella; Nigel with his polite enthusiasms; Tom with his 'proper' man food; Jamie with his helpful foodie japes; those hairy bikers; nice double-barrelled Hugh; Lorraine; Rachel in her little Paris kitchen (ah, Rachel); all those Bake Off bakers, along with the Masterchefs, including, in the early days, a few who could barely master one end of a kitchen knife from the other.

In the beginning there was Delia Smith. Other TV cooks haunt the old TV pantry, but it was Delia who popularised domestic science as mass televisual entertainment.

The thing about Delia, apart from the recipes working, as everyone always said, was that you never saw her eat. Food stayed primly away from mouth, almost as if to cook was godly but to eat was wicked.

Nowadays chefs on TV are far less restrained. Some of them more or less bungee-jump from a great height into whatever they have just made, face first and with food all over the shop.

Part of me does begin to wonder. Will all these programmes about food suddenly explode after a final mass bout of TV stomach ache? I do hope not or else I will have to find something else to do.

Up to a point such programmes educate as well as entertain. I've picked up a few tips down the years, including how to look cocky while kneading bread dough. Thanks to Paul Hollywood for that one.

If watching all these programmes encourages people to cook more, that's all to the good. Whether or not such a correlation exists is hard to measure. At her height, Delia could cause a run on any ingredient she mentioned on television. That suggests people must have tried to cook something, and hopefully they still are.

When British television momentarily breaks off from food, property is next. Sarah Beeny seems to present every other show on Channel 4. She had a new one this week called Sarah Beeny Flogs a Dead Horse. Well, it wasn't really called that, but perhaps it should have been. I used to like these affairs, but my patience is beginning to wear laminate thin.

If people who watch food shows don't always eat as well as their viewing habit suggests, then property programme addicts don't live as palatially either. Sometimes these property shows bring me down a little. This happens with Grand Designs, but I do have a soft spot for Kevin McCloud's show. It's just that the funds are lacking for such grand experiments in our household.

The 1,000K House: Tricks Of The Trade, which just finished on BBC2, was more down to earth. Presenters Kieran Long and Piers Taylor visit people with big problems and small budgets to offer design and architectural solutions that don't cost a fortune.

The houses in question are usually normal, lived-in, scruffy, disappointing abodes, way beyond a reviving lick of paint. The penny-pressed owners wouldn't even earn a snooty glance from grand old Kevin. Yet the solutions are often ingenious.

So are we better fed and better housed thanks to British television's twin obsessions? Almost certainly not, but we have happily wasted time we could have spent cooking or DIY-ing. I enjoy the first of those tasks very much; the other one not a lot.