The appeal of small things is something consistent across the history of humankind.
It is behind our strange desire to make smaller models of large things, such as cars or houses, and, possibly explains why we continue to produce children and buy kittens.
It is also surely behind the strange attraction of sheds.
Sheds provide the natural extension of that very secure feeling one gets as a child, hiding in a fort one has constructed of sheets spread over dining chairs.
Sheds are a tiny model of a house, with a small roof, small walls and small doors, yet, wonderfully, one can sit in them and tinker with things, perhaps sit and think, or if one is in a mood get drunk from a bottle of whisky one keeps under the lawn mower where one's wife will never find it.
By the time you read this I will have shifted it.
Amazing Spaces: Shed Of The Year looks at the very fascinating phenomenon of garden sheds, when a new series of the show returns to TV One on October 29.
The show is presented by architect George Clarke, and fits in nicely with the recent obsession with some on the internet with very small homes, which are fine if you have absolutely no belongings or friends you wish to invite home.
George Clarke and his team travel the length and breadth of the British Isles to look at some of the approximately 16 million sheds that sprout from that isle's gardens, in a show that doubles as a competition to crown one lucky soul as owner of Shed of the Year 2015.
And standards are high.
In Kent, or some similar place, George Clarke meets a fellow with a shed uninspiring from the outside, but inside developed as a whole tiny world of model railways, houses and towns that lights up at night in the most remarkable way.
He even has a control room with CCTV screens to monitor his tiny realm.
Surprisingly for a model train enthusiast he has a wife, and even grandchildren.
In another back garden is a reasonably normal, yet attractive wooden shed.
But it hides something special: a roof which slides away on rails to allow a clear view of the night sky from the large telescope inside.
Yes: it is a shed-servatory.
Amazing Spaces is a sort of Grand Designs for sheds, where anyone can think big in a very small way.
Meanwhile, Fargo, on Sky's SoHo, has begun with intensity and promise, as has the latest series of The Affair, with the wonderful Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty of The Wire).
These are shows for those at the very apex of the taste community.
With the right technology, you can even watch them in your shed.
• Charles Loughrey
