All right, I watch quite a lot of daytime TV, and there is plenty there to make you question your existence, but nothing - not even Alan Titchmarsh or Loose Women - fills me with as much despair as Michael Parkinson advertising insurance.

Does he, you wonder, need the cash?  The man has, in the words of Seventies' country popsters Doctor Hook, more money than a horse has hairs.  He lives in Bray in Berkshire in a solid gold house. Well, maybe not solid gold, but it is right on the river in one of the priciest areas of the country, so it might as well be.  I think he has a house in Australia as well.  He certainly used to, but maybe he has sold it to add to the millions in his bank account. 

And good luck to him.  Really.  He did some brilliant interviews on his Saturday night chat show in the old days - with Robert Mitchum, James Cagney, Peter Ustinov, Dr Jacob Bronowski, Georgie Best, Sellers and Milligan; the kind of cast list the likes of which we will never see again (primarily because they are all dead, but you know what I mean).  He also used to do a great movie show on Granada called Cinema, which fostered a lifelong interest in film in me and, I suspect, other youngsters growing up at the time.  Additionally, he brought to a wider public the work of brilliant people like Billy Connolly; and on his radio shows, he gave airtime to some excellent jazz, and MOR singers like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.  And his sportswriting - let us not forget that - in the Sunday Times in the Sixties and Seventies was required reading. 

God, Parky, you've had a life.  You've been blessed, and so have we, enjoying your work.  You are 76 years old now, Parky, time surely to look back on a life well lived, and to maybe sit in the snug of the Michelin-starred pub you own with your son, reminisce a little, and take quiet satisfaction in your achievements and the financial security they have earned you.  So what the merry fucking hell are you doing on my TV flogging insurance?

You are an intelligent man, Parky, so I suppose you realise why it is they are stuffing YOUR every orifice - rather than those of, say, Des O'Connor - full of yet more money to hawk their insurance? 

It is because the product is exactly the same as a million others, but your gruff Yorkshire vowel sounds suggest, for some reason, financial probity, and your history in entertainment as detailed above will stand you in good stead with an audience who, rather than making life-changing decisions on the say-so of a financial advisor, prefer to take advice from the man who used to interview Billy Connolly on the telly. 

What is more in doing this gig you are taking work from some silvery-haired old English actor who has done his time in repertory theatre, voicing corporate videos, and playing man-in-back-of-taxi in Carry On movies, and who probably really needs the much much smaller fee he would get for it. 

I am not, it should be said, one of those people who follows a strict fundamentalist Bill Hicks line on celebrities voicing commercials.  I would do it myself if anybody ever felt there was any value in my patronage.  (But what can I say, I didn't get the Toilet Duck gig, and as far as I know, Dignitas are not currently doing any advertising).  For a lot of entertainers, it is a short life at the top, so if some young comedian wants to provide for his family by advertising, say, one hundred per cent pear cider, more power to him.  Also, if the advert is in some way entertaining in itself, like Rowan Atkinson's credit card ads, Peter Kay's beer ads, or the Fosters-sponsored Alan Partridge shows on the internet, let's not get prissy and high-minded over them.

But Parky, Parky, Parky, your ads are not funny, not entertaining, and the message you are conveying to poor old bastards like me is that unless I sign up to give these fly-by-night insurance salesmen a fiver a week I will not be providing properly for my loved ones, and after I have gone they will be forced to live in penury, subsisting on condemned meat from Lidl. 

Do you really believe in the product, Parky?  Did you research it?  And do you not recognise the irony in someone who never need worry for one micro-second about the fate of his family after he's gone, scaring the shit out of the lost and the lonely snoozing in front of Countdown? 

For god's sake Parky, leave us alone and let us enjoy our last few years on this planet in relative peace, without the bloody insurance people trying to drain the last few bob out of us before we shuffle off to a place where the financial services industry finally cannot reach us.  Parky, you've got enough money.  Just say no.