SIR - I spent my life under the misconception that life at 65 would be idyllic and that, while not financially prosperous, my every need would cared for.

Now I find the only good thing about being old is being a grandad.

If you visited the UK from another planet, read our newspapers and magazines, watched our television or films, in fact studied every facet of our way of life in a report to take back to your planet, you may be forgiven in reasoning that the older population have either been incarcerated in ghettos or eliminated by euthanasia. Because we do not exist!

The website www.statistics.gov.uk says the UK population is ageing. The proportion of the population aged 65 and over has increased, but the proportion below the age of 16 has generally decreased over the last 30 years.

The percentage of people under the age of 16 fell from 25 per cent in mid-1971 to 19 per cent in mid-2005. Over the same period, the percentage aged 65 and over increased from 13 per cent to 16 per cent. I believe that even those figures are out of date now.

While this information should have been the catalyst for our national media to produce programme's for the largest section of the viewing public, in fact the reverse is the case.

Indeed, the BBC for instance has set its stall wrong, an example being the sacking of Moira Stewart at the old age of 55. I can fully understand the logic of the sacking because Moira was too well educated, well presented, and did not have a single tattoo or nose ring.

Luckily for her, however, she is pretty well off and I doubt if she will be joining the majority of us oldies in our only weekly self indulgence, that being the finger numbing necessity of popping pills from our blister pack prescriptions, while watching the third repeat of Eastenders.

Richard W Brown, Malvern.