I can’t say I’m surprised that Sky has released some more impressive results - or that it's willing to take 1,000 folk from the dole queue. It's a gritty outfit (they say 'challenger', i say 'slightly chippy') that run rings round the flat-footed broadcasting oppo.

When, at the age of 46, I became a father for the second time, the first thing I did – realising I was never going out ever again – was to get down to Peter Jones with my 13-year-old son and buy a 42-inch plasma-screen television, a Panasonic. It’s a beaut, and we almost got twin hernias dragging it into the house.  OK, so it’s an eco-nightmare. And when I turn it on the lights go dim in all my neighbours' houses. But we all love it. At the same time I said goodbye to terrestrial TV and signed up for the full monty Sky package, which cost me an eye-watering sixty quid a month - which included high definition telly. 

I’ve been telling my acquaintances at Sky that they don’t shout loud enough about HD. Today it looks as if they’ve finally woken up to its true competitive advantage, and are going to start seriously pushing it by reducing the price of the Sky+HD box from £150 to £49. It really is infinitely superior to vanilla TV. Indeed, you grow slightly complacent until you are forced to watch a football game on ITV and end up spending most of the 90 minutes peering at the pixels and trying to tell the difference between Craig Bellamy and Carlos Tevez (both are descended from Orks).

Incidentally, much to my wife’s horror, I’m now threatening cast off the shackles of The New Austerity and use my birthday money to trade up to the Panasonic 50-inch, despite it costing 50% more (that’s bell-curve economics for you) and despite the fact that I’ll need a forklift to get it into the house. Keynes would approve.   

In today's bulletin:
Shell profits fall on lower oil price (kind of)
Davos Day One: Reasons for cheer despite the long faces
Nintendo and Sony suffer in the Land of the Rising Yen
Bank lending: not ending?
Editor's blog: Sky's no limit

'If you feel down and you put on a tiara or a cute sparkly headband, it like totally brightens up your day,' noted the heiress. How true. You really are a philosopher, Paris. The new Alain de Botton. Trouble is, I left my headband behind today and tiaras are just soooo 2007.

So on the day when the stats finally acknowledge that we’re in recession, let’s leap from the ridiculous world of Paris to the sublime one of TS Eliot, who wrote: 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality'. I certainly felt I’d consumed enough reality this week when I read two FT pieces online in quick succession. The first was a thorough rubbishing of Uk plc from investor Jim Rogers. The second was a massive outpouring from the human word-machine Prof Willem Buiter of the LSE, a rising star of the recession and the leading horseman of the Apocalypse. Reading the twin opinions left one with the ineluctable impression that the UK is a totally-crocked Iceland-on-Thames, and we may as well all give up and go home now. At the end of a long day, they were a cruel double blow – a rabbit-punch to the kidney and a haymaker straight into the solar plexus. I felt so humiliated and dissed that I wanted to go out and lamp an investment banker.

Firstly, I really hope they are wrong. Secondly, I think they might be wrong but I really don’t know. But thirdly, things are now getting so bad that we are in serious danger of talking ourselves into the abyss. Maybe careless talk can cost lives – three crash-related suicides, by the last count.  

Comment is, of course, free in any democracy. We can yak and yak, and blog and blog to our hearts' content - as long as we don’t invade the privacy of celebs like Paris and get those charmers from libel lawyers Carter-Ruck with their outrageous contingency fee agreements onto our backs. No, that’s far too serious an area for freedom of expression.

We also wouldn’t want to follow the example of South Korea, where a 30-year-old blogger called Park Dae-sung is facing trial for being 'too pessimistic' in his financial forecasts. Mr Dae-sung became a household name for his accurate forecasts of sharp falls in Korea’s won currency, declines in the Seoul stock market and Lehman Brothers going belly-up. He faces up to five years in prison if found guilty of violating 'communication laws'.

But we do need to watch it. It may be bad, but it ain’t Armaggeddon. 

In today's bulletin:
Recession is official - and it's worse than we thought
Editor's blog: The Paris Hilton stimulus plan
Microsoft to log off 5,000 staff
MT's Week in 60 Seconds
Be an inspiring leader, with YouTube

I bought my first ever car in 1984, aged 23. It cost me £250 from a nurse I met at a Social Biology A-level evening class. 

Had I been Italian, it would have been a racy little Fiat 500 or maybe even a nippy Alfasud. Had I been French, it’d have been a Citroen 2CV complete with an 'Energie atomique – non merci' sticker on the rear window, or a DS if I was a fashion victim. If I was a German, it might have been a sparky little BMW 2002 or a Beetle.

As a South London Brit, it was a Morris Marina 1.3 Super in red. With badly fading paintwork. Truly, the Marina was one of the ugliest sets of wheels ever to tread tarmac. I can only thank God I resisted the allure of a brown Allegro.

I reminisce in this way to illustrate an important point about the tragic long-term decline of Britain’s car industry since the Second World War: namely, after turning out crap cars like my Marina, the Allegro, the Vauxhall Viva and the Rover SD2, how can anyone have been surprised that the whole home-owned industry went down the lavatory?

What’s left is owned by the Japanese, the Indians and the Americans - and that is now on short-term working with a begging bowl being placed in front of Peter Mandelson. I dread to think what will be left once demand picks up again.

I’ve just spent a while trying out the new Vauxhall Insignia, which is a pretty good set of wheels. Although it bears the Vauxhall name, there is nothing British about it – it’s made in Germany and they’ve fallen over backwards to give it styling hints and the feel of a BMW or a VW. Well you wouldn’t want to style it like a Rover or a Morris Marina, would you?

In today's bulletin:
President Barack Obama's poisoned chalice
Deflation worries grow - but RBS bounces back
Burberry downsizes as progress checked
Asos boosted by young trendies
Editor's blog: The problem with British cars

Apart from divorce lawyers, the other industry that gets properly into gear this week is the 'detox' business. After all the gross excesses of the festive season, we all feel the need to do penance and make amends for the appalling liberties we’ve taken with our bodies over the last fortnight. The easy way out is the detox purge, with all its daft potions and lotions.

This year, rather amusingly, the old-fashioned science lobby is ready for alternative medicine pushers - or quacks, as we shouldn’t be afraid to call them. The charity Sense About Science has been on a publicty blitz which reminds us: 'Our bodies have their own ‘detox’ mechanisms. The gut prevents bacteria and many toxins from entering the body. When harmful chemicals do enter the body, the liver acts as an extraordinary chemical factory, usually combining them with its own chemicals to make a water soluble compound that can be excreted by the kidneys. The body thus detoxifies itself. The body is re-hydrated with ordinary tap water. It is refreshed with a good night’s sleep'.

'These processes do not occur more effectively as a result of taking 'detox' tablets, wearing 'detox' socks, having a 'detox' body wrap, eating Nettle Root extract, drinking herbal infusions or 'oxygenated' water, following a special 'detox' diet, or using any of the other products and rituals that are promoted. They waste money and sow confusion about how our bodies, nutrition and chemistry actually work.'

One especially amusing hit is scored with a volley at Boots. The product criticised is Boots' 'detox brush', which the company claims will 'brush away impurities' and 'stimulates the lymphatic system to help remove impurities and toxins from your skin'. The charity argues that the brush simply cleans the skin.

Boots said the brush works by stimulating the circulation to remove blockages in the body's lymphatic system. 'All Boots products go through extensive scientific trials and testing with human volunteers. Our evidence is based on customer feedback and the results they saw and how they felt,' said a spokeswoman. Just as well those who work in the pharmacy at Boots selling proper drugs believe in the double blind trial as a method of proving efficacy, rather than how patients 'felt'...

The quacks won’t take this laying down. There’s too much money at stake in all this unsubstantiated, unscientific guff, as I discovered when I attacked it in The Observer years ago. I received the most virulent post bag I’ve ever had in my life - including one charmer who, when I dared to question aromatherapy, wrote that she hoped I broke my leg and was failed by conventional medicine.

In today's bulletin:
Debenhams and Next see sales fall - and their shares rise
House prices fell at record rate in 2008
FSA lifts controversial ban on shorts
Editor's blog: Down with detox
SMEs still surprisingly perky about 2009