Saddam Hussein, who exempted himself and his ministers from his own ban on satellite TV, has now been banned from having a set in his cell.

The great dictator can't savour, for instance, Modern Day Pashas, a soap opera that goes out on the Al-Sharqiya channel for an hour every afternoon in Baghdad. It's a satire with heavy pantomime overtones in which corruption is pilloried with exuberant knockabout.

Or perhaps Saddam might have preferred to watch the astrologer taking calls from Iraqis who are seeking advice about important decisions or events in their lives. "No, I'm afraid that the planets will not help. You must work hard for your examination."

The channel, which uses sophisticated graphics and pop videos, has built an enthusiastic following. There are new lifestyle programmes like Labour and Materials, a format which has clearly been imported from the West and has a strong Iraqi flavour.

It's also a cheap way of filling airtime.

Satire

Another popular show is the Caricatura programme. Its satires about police trying to bribe drivers or of children kidnapping adults and demanding ransoms, are widely enjoyed.

No longer are there sequences of the great man letting off his shotgun into the air, reviewing military parades or kissing babies. "We might as well have stuck a picture of him on the outside of the screen and not bothered to switch the set on," was a popular jibe.

When Saddam fell there was a sudden mushrooming of demand for television sets, decoders and satellite dishes. Banned under Saddam's rule, or at least only available to senior Baathists, these were bought as fast as they could be imported at $350 a time.

The biggest change in what viewers could watch during the war was the growth of Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, both fiercely critical of the Americans and the channels chosen by the insurgents for their uncompromising messages.

Iraqi conservatives alarmed

President Bush in his State of the Union address promised to try to correct what the US saw as the excesses of the media hostile to the coalition. Millions of dollars were poured into various new channels in an attempt to counterbalance the sort of coverage viewers were exposed to.

But many Iraqis seem to have ignored the new output from Virginia. They have turned off because Al Iraqiya is seen as either too American or containing too many bought-in shows from Cairo and Beirut instead of the all Iraqi offerings of the new Al-Sharqiya channel.

The explosion of new satellite channels may soon revive debates about whether there should be limits on Iraq's new media. From Ayatollah Sistani's sophisticated new web site it is evident that there are conservative religious elements which might be alarmed.

Sistani's supporters won most of the votes in the recent elections and the Shia influence will obviously dominate the new government.

But trying to control TV may not be at the top of their agenda. In any case, as one Iraqi TV observer puts it "there's nothing they can do; the genie is out of the bottle now."