The word is that the government may soon resort to television advertising as the next stage of its righteous, but failing, campaign to ensure that every child in the country is properly dosed up with the MMR vaccine.

It did this before, towards the end of last summer, and what followed was a significant reduction in the number of children receiving the vaccine and, latterly, a couple of outbreaks of measles. Could it be that there was something wrong with the film?

In it, defenceless, innocent children were surrounded by prowling lions, supposedly symbolic of the sinister and appalling threat posed by measles, mumps and rubella. Trouble is, the lions and the children seemed entirely oblivious to each other, presumably because, for understandable reasons, they were brought together digitally rather than being physically in the same place at the same time. And clearly nobody had told the animals to emote.

But perhaps, also, parents were mistrustful of the comparative risks implied by the ad. If, after an interminably tense and fractious day at London Zoo, you were to grab your screeching child by the hair and, in a moment of temporary derangement, propel it over the moat and into the lion enclosure, my guess is that its risk of incurring serious harm would be much greater than the one in 1,000 posed by measles. My guess is it would be something like one in two, or maybe odds on. And certainly, your child's risk of being eaten whole, Gap parka and all, would be a lot worse than one in 100,000, which is the risk of death for a child with measles. So the comparative threats were risibly misleading.

And here's another problem with the film. People rather like lions, and many parents undoubtedly find them infinitely preferable to their own children. Lions are sleek and handsome; they have a languid grace and elegance and disport themselves with a certain dumb dignity - all qualities absent from your average stumbling, hysterical toddler. It was surely the wrong image to use.

Far better to have had the children, naked and defenceless, stalked by a small group of scoutmasters, Roman Catholic priests, long distance lorry drivers or bogus social workers - smiling, arms outstretched, beckoning, in malevolent supplication. That would grab the attention. And while there would still be a disparity of risk - priests, for example, are much more dangerous than measles, obviously - it would be less of a disparity than that stuff with the lions.

I suppose an alternative - an unlikely one, I'll grant you - would be for the Department of Health to present all the salient information on MMR and inoculations generally - gloriously unspun - so that we can make an intelligent and informed decision on the evidence before us.

At the moment it feels as if we are the somewhat querulous, wilful toddlers without a clue as to what's best for us, and that if they simply keep telling us the same thing, loudly, over and over again, then that will do in lieu of a considered debate. Only the truly paranoid believe in the absurd conspiracy theory - which I've encountered several times this month - that the government is deliberately withholding crucial information about MMR for its own satanic ends. But if it scrapped the film, couldn't the money saved be spent on new research that addressed the precise points raised by those who are, rightly or wrongly, deeply fearful of the vaccine?

To mourn or not to mourn?

Sadly, it is impossible for broadcasters to do right by everybody when covering the death of a famous, but only marginally significant, public figure, as we saw at the weekend with Princess Margaret.

There are those fiercely republican viewers and listeners who don't want the business so much as mentioned on the news programmes. "Who cares?" they shout, callously and seditiously. And there are the others who demand that the schedules be cleared for at least 24 hours of wailing, weeping and gnashing of teeth, interspersed with the hourly performance of the national anthem - especially verse three, with its exciting references to vile foreigners - and the occasional reverential, lachrymose, gobbet from Lord St John of Fawsley.

What should one do? To help us, we have our guidelines, of course, drawn up by very senior people who have given long and earnest thought to the question; how do we best represent and serve the feelings of the nation at large? But it's such an extraordinarily tricky line to tread, amply illustrated by the 142-page document that arrived on my desk a few months ago: "BBC Producer Guidelines for Programming in the Event of the Death of Jeffrey Archer, MP." Let me quote some of it to you. In Section 7 (iii) for radio news, there is an injunction that all programming should be, in tone and content, "appropriate to the national mood of jubilation". Then, a little further on, programme editors are advised to devote "considerable" airtime to the resultant "street parties, raves and spontaneous mass demonstrations of exultant happiness". The music networks are not spared advice, either.

Radio 2, for example, is warned to "avoid the playing of particularly sombre music, as this would not be conducive to the natural mood of the general public". The station is also advised to select a song, from an appended list, which should be played on the hour, every hour, for one day after the official announcement. I Feel Good (I Knew That I Would) by James Brown, the rather irritating Captain Sensible version of Happy Talk and, of course, Madonna's Celebrate are all recommended. Laudable though this document is, I fear that we are storing up trouble for ourselves and that we risk antagonising a section of our audience. There will be a minority, however small, who will not want to cavort naked in the streets, or dance around the maypole; they will want to go about their business the same as on any other day. Surely we have a responsibility to them, too?

Stricken by poverty - and now by peers

The people of Unicef took me to Africa recently and succeeded in obliterating every doubt I've ever had about the desirability and effectiveness of charitable aid. Theirs is a magnificent operation and there is something slightly shameful about having to drag me there in person for me to be so convinced. Shameful for me, I hasten to add.

However, I may not be the most recalcitrant of visitors they've felt the need to deal with. Some months earlier, a group of peers of the realm were taken by Unicef to Angola, where, of course, they were met by scenes of squalor and poverty on a scale far surpassing what I witnessed in Uganda. In one particularly desperate backwater they were brought face to face with the wretched, suffering inhabitants of a village where starvation, disease and the infliction of violence were simply the way of life. One antediluvian old scrote pushed his way forward and commanded the interpreter thus: "Would you ask these people," he barked, "where they take their holidays?"

Well, Ravello, obviously. Tuscany is so recherché these days, don't you think?

· Rod Liddle is the editor of Radio 4's Today programme. His radio diary will appear next week.