Let’s talk telly. When stage shows are being cancelled left right and centre and going to the movies has become an exercise in foolhardiness for the risk averse, lots of people have been watching lots of television these past dark, chill and virus-laden months. 

Those of us who would normally avoid daytime television like the plague, at night will work our remote fingers to the bone homing in on docos about Greta Thunberg and BBC murder mysteries set in parts of Scotland so remote we can’t understand what anyone is saying, have become glued to the screen. 

Bingeing is the new black. At unusual hours we have been lining up at home for a good old dose of melodrama and catching shows that quite frankly leave us wondering why we bothered. 

The latter category cannot be more highly credentialled than The Joy of Painting, with Bob Ross. 

If you thought painting by numbers was a cop out, artistically speaking, you will be in thrall to Bob from the off.

The man obligingly rolls onto our screens round about wine o’clock so while we’re hooting with laughter as he gives us yet another version of sky, clouds, trees and/or a shack or lake, we get to have a drink as well. 

With his pared back ginger fro and matching whiskers, his folksy patter, and his cosy, set-formula brushwork he is the next best thing to Valium.

I cling tenaciously to the world of Bob in the hope one day he will break out and do an actual painting. You know, one where an artist goes outside, looks at a patch of earth, water and sky and paints it onto a canvas. Not so with Bob. His vision of art has been distilled in the essence of chocolate box lids and cowboy comics. No surprises when he picks up that brush. You are going to get fluffy clouds, hills in the distance, hills a bit closer and maybe a hill or two right up front, a thicket of unidentifiable bush and a lake. 

You may get a log cabin. It’s odds on you will get a huge and unnecessary tree. You wait for that tree. He’s a cunning fox. Just when you’re bashing the side of the lounge and shouting ‘come on Bob give us the tree’ he’ll go and do it. It’s hardwired into his DNA.

Although he’s been dead these many years, his mid-80s show filmed in Muncie, Indiana, a place of such ordinariness it perfectly captures the Rossian zeitgeist, has become iconic. Bob’s kitschy canvasses are the American landscape equivalent of Tretchikoff’s Chinese Lady and Hans Heysen’s gum trees. 

I have it on authority from an art teacher he enjoys cult status among her students, many of whom sport Bob tee shirts they have imported from the US or screenprinted themselves. 

Look, I cannot recommend the show too highly. It will relax you no end. And as much as I snigger about his direly predictable canvasses, would I buy a Bob if I could? Damn right I would.