It’s been a few years since I was in hospital being treated for severe depression but it was an experience that I can never forget.

We had therapy sessions where we were advised to try certain techniques to help improve our mental state.

One of them was to get plenty of sleep and plenty of exercise; another was to try meditation, something I struggled with on account of being irritated by the sound of a wretched leaf blower right outside the windows on most days; and the third bit of advice was to stop looking at and reading about the news.

This last was a bit tricky for me as my job at that time was as a newsreader on Anglia TV.

So, unless I quit my telly role I had no choice but to follow the news almost every day. There was a certain irony in this but I understood what the psychiatrists meant.

It is hard not to be depressed and concerned by the constant bombardment of awful stories.

I don’t read the news for a living any more, but it’s still virtually impossible to avoid it.

There’s so much cruelty, particularly to children and to animals, both of which have me reaching for the remote switch. I know this is a cop-out and I know that I should be made aware of what goes on in the world, but I just can’t bring myself to look.

And yet it’s not always possible to avoid grim content. For instance, in between innocuous repeats, the RSPCA brings us pictures of sick and injured animals, while various charities show children in distress who need money and medical help. When these appeals come on the screen I often have to turn the other way or leave the room altogether. And I am ashamed of this; I wish I could face it, but I can’t.

The recent mention of the escaped calf being rammed by a police driver was truly upsetting. I didn’t see the collision but the pictures of the forlorn creature afterwards were a sorry sight.

Luckily the animal did recover fully. A former police officer said that from his training it seemed the right thing to do for the safety of the public, and a farmer agreed.

(By the way, the former policeman was a Mister Ramm, and I’m not making this up.)

In the past we had details of stories on the news that would be edited to spare the viewers, acknowledging their sensibilities. Nowadays, it seems nothing is spared though there’s often that warning that “some viewers may find these scenes distressing”. How journalists covering wars cope with what they witness is incredible.

Safe in the studio I used to deal with it by becoming detached from the story; as I turned the page or as it later became, the auto-cue, and moved to the next story I’d forgotten what I’d just read.

Being on the box gave me great opportunities but it wasn’t all wine and roses, it did have a downside. When I was on telly in the West Country I worked for a while alongside Fern Britton.

Eventually, she went on to greater things and I was so sorry to learn that she had become the victim of a stalker. Thankfully, he’s now been prosecuted.

This never happened to me I’m happy to say, but some years ago one of my Anglia pals was threatened over quite a long period of time. What made it more distressing was the fact that she was pregnant.

Eventually, the police became involved and the stalking stopped. The stalkers? It turned out that the guilty parties were a couple of women.

The worst I ever got was a sheaf of very rude photos of what I thought was me talking into a “microphone”, accompanied by suggestive words.

Of course, the “microphone” wasn’t a microphone. I got a letter from the sender asking me to marry him, if not to send him a photo. What, another one? Anyway, to keep him quiet, I sent him an elegant study.

Years later I heard that the photo was for sale on eBay, with a price tag of 50 pence. Bidders so far?

None.

Ah, well. That’s showbiz