Peter Rhodes on obsessive lawn mowing, a great TV monarch and why we have two ears but only one mouth

Monty Don, the TV gardener beloved of English ladies of a certain age, blames “a mainly male obsession” for the nation's fixation with immaculately “stripy and neat” mowed lawns.

We get blamed for everything, don't we? But is it a male obsession? Or do men mow lawns simply because women tell them to? Clearly, we need more research.

My personal contribution to the great mowing debate has been to get a professional in for the first few cuts of the season. With a strimmer and a power mower, he achieves in five minutes a task that takes me 40 minutes and if he's happy to do it for the whole year, suits me.

I have this male obsession with sitting in a deckchair and doing nothing.

The Indian dancer and choreographer Akram Khan is working on a version of Kipling's enduring favourite, The Jungle Book, and has some wise words to offer. He says his theme in the production will be about the dying art of listening.

As he puts it: “We have two ears and one mouth. But our modern civilisation seems to think that we have two mouths and one ear. We’ve lost the art of listening.”

The Church of England is to introduce a quota so that 30 per cent of priests on its leadership programme will be BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic). At present only one out of 42 diocesan bishops is BAME, a figure that prompts the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to be “sorry and ashamed” that “we are still institutionally racist.”

But maybe it's wrong to blame the clergy. After all, priests are not head-hunted by bishops or appointed by synods. They are supposed to be called by the Almighty, and their superiors are guided by the Holy Spirit.

So is God institutionally racist? Thought for the day.

Another great debate arises on BBC4 which has become the go-to channel for truly ancient repeats. Elizabeth R, starring Glenda Jackson, was made 50 years ago and is getting rave reviews today from critics who were not even born back then. It was an excellent series.

And just when you're running away with the idea that all telly drama was better in the old days, BBC4 is also screening the original 1970s All Creatures Great and Small, just to remind us that it wasn't.

Patchy, to put it kindly.

I wrote some days ago about the nightmare experience of newsreaders, looking at the autocue and realising an unpronounceable word is approaching. Today, it's a double whammy. You might just stumble through the name of the erupting volcano in Iceland: Fagradalsfjall. And then you see that the next paragraph, putting today's blazing lava in context, refers to the 2010 eruptions at (deep breath) Eyjafjallajökull.

If it's a really bad day, the next news report might be from Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen by the Sea. Of blessed memory.