Janet Street-Porter: Forget local TV if you want to know what's happening

Facing plummeting ad revenue, ITV gained approval from Ofcom to reduce regional news bulletins and cut local programming by half. Yesterday it was announced that about 430 staff would be made redundant, although the broadcaster claimed it would provide some form of local service – with the number of bulletins drastically reduced – until 2012. In the Border region, for example, the number of programmes will plummet from 17 to just nine.

I've worked in television for four decades and I won't mourn the demise of local news. In North Yorkshire, I have the misfortune to watch the local bulletins during the BBC news at 10pm. They are appalling – like telly from the 1950s. The set is unattractive. Most of the items seem to be shot on a council estate somewhere in Leeds or outside the local court. Sport is always among the so-called newsworthy events. The area served is vast, probably the size of Luxembourg, stretching from revitalised former mining communities south of Wakefield to miles of moorland in Upper Nidderdale, where I live.

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Harrogate, the richest and most cosmopolitan town in the region, barely figures, unless a member of royalty is visiting or the Yorkshire Show is on. Whether it's on the BBC or ITV, the presentation of local fare is lacklustre. When there was a local disaster – severe flooding in Doncaster and Sheffield in 2007 – the live coverage would have disgraced a group of media students.

When I'm in Whitstable, Kent, it's just as bad. Newsroom Southeast covers from London to Southampton to Dover and Margate! Kent and Yorkshire are fascinating, rich and varied counties, with masses of newsworthy happenings, but you won't see many of them on local television.

Local news, hampered by limited budgets, annoys more people than it serves. I once worked in Carlisle, producing a series for Channel 4, and the nightly bulletins, featuring murders from Manchester or redundancies in Newcastle, seemed irrelevant in a farming community. Ofcom sets the standards which broadcasters must adhere to, and they want local news to continue on ITV. I disagree. The BBC must provide it as part of its public service remit and ITV should be relieved of the burden. The BBC has more staff and better facilities – indeed it has a whole news channel broadcasting around the world. But it serves Dubai better than Dover or Durham. The BBC also trains staff to multi-task, filing bulletins to television and radio. The problem is that most of the talent doesn't want to work in local news. It's the poor relation, the training ground, and that's what you see on the screen.

The way forward is to make regional news even more local and the areas it serves much smaller. New technology could mean that ordinary people could file to local BBC bulletins from hubs in village halls, shopping malls and town centres. Local news should be multi-platform, using the internet as a message board and discussion tool replacing local news papers. Soon, we will be able to time-shift all programming, and so truly local documentaries can be made by teams of people from villages and towns, and swapped around a local network. The old way of doing news – a chap in a suit reading a bulletin in a studio at 10.20 at night – has had its day. Thanks goodness.

Don't blame the poor Bridget Joneses. They're in a trap

His nickname might be "Two Brains" but David Willetts, the shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, has boobed, claiming that a new generation of university-educated, Bridget Jones-style women contribute to family breakdown because they are likely to be the breadwinners. Bridget Jones was a girl who was desperate to find a chap, so it's the wrong analogy. The vast majority of people on the minimum wage are female, and many of them have no choice but to "bring home the bacon", to use Mr Willetts's naff expression.

Growing your own veg is like having sex

One of the most unpopular policies this government could have remedied relatively cheaply is the lack of single-sex wards in the NHS. Judging by my post and emails, many of you agree. Now the Tories promise to double the number of single rooms, creating 45,000 extra within five years of coming to power, at a cost of £1.6bn. Post-natal women and mental patients will all be offered them as a matter of course, and not before time. Can someone now deal with hospital car parking charges, which cause immense distress to families visiting their relatives? NHS Trust executives should pay for their own parking. That would help.

*According to a government adviser, we can deal with spiralling prices and food shortages by growing our own veg. It's true some prices have risen 30 per cent in the last year – potatoes, carrots, onions and tomatoes cost more because of poor harvests, lousy weather and high transport costs. But returning to the Good Life isn't without pitfalls. Growing your own is an emotional roller-coaster – big expectations, fervent prayers, a brief period of abundance interspersed with abject failure. A bit like most people's sex lives.

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