Stamp collecting is all about assembling small pieces of paper with illustrations on them, taking them away from the original context they were used in and displaying them in special books. Face it, stamps are pretty much the same the world over, give or take a triangular one from this country, a picture of a cosmonaut on that one, and so forth. I find it easy to be dismissive of stamp collecting, but in truth the tv schedules offer programmes just as formulaic — and I speak as a fan.

Right now, I’m watching Masterchef. Once again, a group of hopefuls assemble to impress the hosts. The first challenge is to create a dish from the ingredients provided. While they do so, they’re interviewed about their hopes and passions, to enable the audience to build up a relationship with the contenders. The judges agree on a couple of cooks as being clear winners, a couple more as being hopeless, and quibble over who of the remaining two will go through to the next round of three contestants.

Thrust into a professional kitchen during lunchtime service, the three are put through an ordeal there before having to come back to the studio and cook the presenters a kickass meal of their own devising. And the very best of those contestants gets to progress further. It’s like this every episode until we get through to play-offs, and a victor is declared. Simple as that: yet millions of people tune in to see amateur chefs juggle different combinations of meat, fish, and veg to win over the show’s hosts.

Weird, that I complained in my last piece about the familiarity of Crazy Heart, and am now celebrating just the same when it appears on the small screen. I know already that when Masterchef finishes I’ll switch to see Gordon Ramsay belittling American restaurateurs in the process of helping them reinvent their offerings to the public. And I can tell you now how the show will go. Gordon will turn up, order food that he barely touches. He will use his reputation to ensure the restaurant is full for an evening service which will fall apart due to the higher numbers and bring tensions to a head among the team. And after threatening to walk out on the biggest bunch of clowns he has set sight on, Gordon will get to the root of the personal issues involved in the eaterie’s failure, and resolve them in time for the restaurant to get a makeover of its interior and its menu, which will be served triumphantly to a full house.

Thing being, humans like the familiar. Note that we have a seven day week, rather than an endless succession of new days. Those seven days are broken down into 24 hours, and those hours need to be filled with something. Which breaks down into paying for tv, and watching it.

The trick is to balance repetition with difference. Use the same structure to deliver different stories, however similar they are to ones we’ve already seen. You know The Bill will always get their man, and now the show runs after nine that maybe scenes and language will be spicier than before. The Doctor will continue to save Earth, whether he’s wearing David Tennant’s face or Tom Baker’s scarf. Scooby Doo and the gang will forever investigate supernatural mysteries, only to find out that the source of the scare is a greedy landowner or possessive janitor. And so on.

Better than that, having watched these adventures once, we go back and re-experience them — sometimes in the company of hundred of others, in the case of Star Trek conventions. And can even buy them on DVD to ensure we can always get that same hit of House whenever we want. The more I think of it, the less sense this need for repetition makes. But then I look at my Amazon wishlist, and see the number of box sets for shows I’m already familiar with, and start to relive the moment when I first caught Robbie Coltrane as Cracker, or reminisce about The Water Margin…