ULTRA-LOCAL television services will give you up-to-the-minute coverage on things like what’s happening in next door’s garden, it has emerged.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to give every 100 square meters of country its own television channel that will be a lot like the view from your front window but with colour and contrast options.

Hunt said: “People in provincial areas don’t want luxuries like less-awful broadband. It’s interactive and it frightens them.

“Instead they want detailed reportage on what the squirrels along their road have been doing, punctuated by news reports about how the woman at number 11 who walks with a stick won £10 on the scratchies and the hunt to catch that bus driver who pisses in bottles then flings them in the hedge on the corner.

“Possibly there will be a local equivalent of Mad Men called Road Men, about the two blokes doing some tarmacking down the road and including some painstakingly accurate shovels.

“To anyone thinking that perhaps they don’t want this I’d like to say, you want this.”

Meanwhile it has emerged that the seemingly inexplicable drive for ultra-local television may be the result of a sustained letter-writing campaign by a single mental person.

Tom Logan, from Stevenage, said: “I have written 10,073 letters to the government asking for pictures of my house to be on the telly, each written in block capitals with a marker pen but signed with different clever aliases like ‘Ray Turbot’ and ‘Anna Finkie’.

“I did this while you were busy. And now I have won.”

He added: “My next project  is to initiate a prime-time BBC1 series called Prawns Versus Embryos.”