Former Crimewatch presenter Sue Cook is quitting the BBC after 20 years to front a major antiques show for Channel 4.

Sir: It is unacceptable for Paul Donovan ("Deeply Suspect", 5 November) to claim that BBC 1's Crimewatch UK can "perpetrate injustice" on the strength of the subjective opinion of a fellow journalist.

Boys' Stuff Crucible Studio, Sheffield

The revelation that there is now a collectors market in McDonald's ephemera is one of those facts that manages to combine shock and inevitability. You can't be serious . . . well, of course. Because the truth is that the collecting virus has only ever had a coincidental connection with discrimination or taste; it doesn't require beauty to thrive, just a minimal durability and relative scarcity. In Darwinian terms it is beautifully adapted as a parasite; each addition to the collection consolidate s its grip on the host organism, becomes a further reason to collect some more.

IT WAS A brutal, premeditated axeing. Last week, Michael Winner's True Crimes (ITV), a programme loudly going on about its ratings, was savaged by an unrepentant programme controller. In mitigation, it has to be said that the perpetrator of the killing was at the back of a very long queue: Winner's show was generally regarded as the salacious, sensationalist end of the wedge of television crime re-enactment. Lest it be thought, however, that the slaying signalled the demise of the genre, last night's schedules came up more loaded with the stuff than a blagger's lock-up.

Sir: May I clarify an important detail in your reporting of the BBC's guidelines on crime coverage (2 June)? The new guidelines apply to the BBC's national and regional news and current affairs programmes, not to programmes like Crimewatch. Crimewatch already has strict guidelines under which it has operated for many years, which prohibit the use of music, special sound effects, slow motion or any other artificial technique to increase dramatic tension.

NEW guidelines warning against sensationalised and gruesome crime reporting are to be issued to BBC staff in an attempt to reduce what the corporation sees as an exaggerated public fear of violent crime.

We are in the grip of a moral panic about crime on television. Quite when it started, or who was responsible, nobody can be sure, but a classic panic it most definitely is. Like some medieval plague, it springs from every sewer in a spontaneous overflow, reaches fever pitch, then mercifully subsides.

Crime programmes where real-life offences are re-enacted should no longer be screened until it is established whether they fuel viewers' fear of violence, the television chief, Michael Grade, said yesterday.

A WOMAN and her son who took some silver along to the BBC Antiques Roadshow, carrying it in an casual holdall because they were sure it was worth so little, saw it turn to gold at Christie's yesterday. Some 20 items which they thought too 'dreadful' even to give away fetched pounds 78,717, writes Dalya Alberge.

Michael Howard has a nasty temper and I hope he wasn't too beastly yesterday when you had to report to him on the theft of the Prince of Wales's knick-knacks. But then if the heir to the throne can't take a skiing holiday without the attentions of the men with bags marked 'swag', how secure can the rest of us feel when we cancel the milk and papers, secure the triple locks and take off for our fortnight in Ilfracombe?

'I WALKED into her office and started the usual small talk about what a charming room it was and what a lovely view and I do like your curtains. She didn't know me from Adam - she doesn't watch the The Antiques Roadshow, and she wasn't interested in my small talk about furnishings. She said, 'Yes, yes, come and sit down. Now tell me, what do you know about the Franco-Prussian war?' '

Roger Cook, fresh from a violent contretemps with Spanish fishermen, gave his cameramen another run for their money when an interviewee set about his Mitsubishi Shogun with a baseball bat. His assailant's defence was that he is actually 'Mr Nice Guy, but that man brought out the worst in me'. Antiques Roadshow specialist Ian Harris was shot in the arm by a gunman during a robbery at his own jewellers, but revealed that he wasn't frightened by the experience; Ian McShane declared that he is quitting the eight-year-old Lovejoy (BBC1), and the show will be put quietly to bed; the Broadcasting Standards Council registered its disapproval of a number of the sex scenes in BBC1's Lady Chatterley; Des O'Connor, it was revealed by a hospital in Surrey, is top choice as background music requested by mothers who are to give birth; June Brown (Dot Cotton of EastEnders), made a casual remark about face-lifts and awoke the next morning to read she's a whisker away from having one.

Ian Harris, a jewellery specialist who regularly appears on BBC Television's Antiques Roadshow, was shot in the arm during a raid on his shop in Conduit Street, central London. One man was arrested, but a second escaped.