Embracing your age means never having to do Glasto again. Bliss!

JON SNOW’S advice is hardly newsworthy. The secret of a long life is healthy eating, stress-busting snoozes, the support of family and neighbours, and a happy outlook.

The question Geriatric Jon didn’t address, on How To Live To 100 (C4), is whether longevity is always a good thing. Not every centenarian is like Captain Sir Tom Moore, a national treasure with a twinkle in his eye to the end.

Professor karol Sikora, writing in Mail Plus last week, made the stark point that our NhS is buckling because it was never designed to cope with such an ageing population. In 1948, when it was set up, life expectancy for men was 66 years. Now it’s 81.

That extra decade-and-a-half is the single biggest reason why hospital wards are overflowing, A&e is chock-a-block, and it’s easier to book front-row tickets to see ed Sheeran than it is to get an ambulance.

Prof Sikora also highlighted how much rarer it is now for the elderly to be cared for at home by their children and grandchildren — while it’s no longer the primary role of married women to stay at home, looking after the very old and very young while their husbands work.

Society has evolved, in other words, far faster than the NhS can keep up. Retired newsreader Jon, who is 75, didn’t consider that, or begin to wonder how we’d cope if everyone lived to 100.

Instead, he delivered a twee, starry- eyed vision of senescence, meeting only those nonagenarians who were active and blessed with a full complement of marbles.

he went foraging on the Greek island of Ikaria for plants with medicinal properties, to make herbal tea. Then he bathed in a thermal spring, went exploring with a retired doctor who learned to sail in his 80s, and danced the night away at a village festival.

In a ten-minute segment grafted on oddly at the end, he flew to California and visited a Seventh Day Adventist community where worshippers live an average ten years longer than most Americans. here, he joined an aerobics class and went to the gym, doing workouts with his new pal harvey who intends to live to 110.

All this was credulous wish-fulfilment rather than serious investigation. It’s no surprise coming from Jon, who has shown himself eager to regenerate himself as a born-again teenager on numerous occasions.

In 2015, he inhaled ‘skunk’ cannabis vapour as part of a Channel 4 experiment. he didn’t get high, just panicky and paranoid. Two years later, he raved with festival fans at Glastonbury, where he allegedly joined in a chant of ‘F*** the Tories’ — something he says he doesn’t remember doing.

Being young clearly doesn’t suit him. he should embrace his dotage instead. Being ancient means never having to do aerobics again... nor go to Glastonbury. Bliss.

DCI Stanhope, in Vera (ITV), doesn’t seem to age a day. Perhaps it’s the bracing northeast air, or the rejuvenating effect of all those murders.

Dracula was also supposed to haunt the North Yorkshire coast, after all: novelist Bram Stoker was inspired by a visit to Whitby. Maybe Vera is a vampire.

She certainly looked at home in a drinkers’ dive called the Crypt Bar. But she isn’t keen on corpses: she could hardly bear to look at the body in a burnt-out car that began this latest case, the first in a new series of six.

Vera’s cases can be infuriatingly bitty, with more red herrings than a fishmonger’s. But this one was well constructed, with key points helpfully repeated for viewers whose memories might need the occasional jog.