It’s nearly a month since my wife’s birthday — and yet I’m basking in the glory of coming up with truly inspired ideas for presents.

If it carries on like this, I will still be in her good books at Christmas.

There are lots of people in the world who could claim to be “difficult to buy for”, but none of them compare with my wife.

It spoils our Christmas and troubles us every March, and our poor kids also have to rack their brains every Mother’s Day.

So when any of us gets a genuinely good idea, that old adage about the giving being as good as the receiving is proved right — and this year my little brain did me proud, coming up with not just one successful idea for a birthday present, but two.

First I booked her a day out at Highclere Castle, where most of Downton Abbey is filmed, and this idea went down very well indeed, even though it’s so popular there that you have to book months in advance and we aren’t actually going until August.

Then I came up with an even better idea, and I don’t know why I never thought of it before.

There are few things we liked more than coming in from a Sunday afternoon walk to find ITV were screening an old Columbo, but few as disappointing as coming home on those Sundays when they forgot to put one on.

Then a light bulb went on inside my head.

So now my wife has a whole box of Columbo DVDs – every episode ever made, in fact – and we not only watch them on Sunday afternoons, but any other time we have an hour-and-a-half to spare. And we don’t have to sit through endless adverts.

Even better than buying the perfect present for your wife, though, is buying one that you can enjoy too. While most men buy their wife something for their birthday with no value to themselves, such as another pointless pair of shoes, I found a gift I like even more than she does.

Columbo, as anybody of a certain age will know, was one of the best series ever made, and for many reasons. Great plots, great acting, great dialogue, great twists… it had everything, all built around the brilliant idea of revealing the details of the crime at the start of the programme, rather than the end.

And all the qualities it had are all the ones that are missing from today’s TV dramas, especially the ones involving crime.

Sure, each episode had a cold-blooded murder, but sometimes you didn’t even see the act committed, whereas today you have to see it committed in bloodthirsty detail, with writers (and presumably viewers) unhappy unless the murderer turns out to be a twisted serial killer.

Just like Star Trek, which came from an era when science fiction didn’t need explosions every five minutes to sustain it, so Columbo didn’t need action to keep your interest. He was never in a shoot-out or a car chase.

All it required was for us to see the workings of the Lieutenant’s exceptional brain and we were happy.

But what I like best about Columbo is the triumph of the so-called ‘ordinary’, apparently disorganised, obviously unrefined little man over the wealthy, seemingly clever and supposedly superior but ultimately selfish, arrogant and nasty villains he comes up against.

It gives you hope that the good guys will win in the end.

Or to look at it another way: it’s how a lot of us are feeling in the run-up to the election.