Remember the Sabbath Day, keep it political Sunday was once the quietest day of the week for the Westminster parties. Now t hey vie for valuable TV air time

THE STORY going the rounds at Westminster last week was that John Major had a hidden agenda in his announcement of liberalised Sunday drinking hours. Simple: he wants the punters to stay in the pub all day, instead of sitting at home watching his ministers being skewered on the burgeoning number of Sunday politicial television programmes.

Today there are up to six broadcasts from which the viewer can choose. Politicians love this media subversion of the sabbath, as long as it works to their advantage. They will cheerfully give up church-going if they can speak to the masses. They like it.It speaks to their vanity. Cabinet ministers even speak of John Major's "celebrated Frost interview".

Today, the chief entertainment is Jeremy Hanley, Conservative Party chairman ( known in the political village as Gaffe-U-Like). Last week it was Tony Blair and John Prescott, in a two-channel double act picking up from the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, earlier in the day.

The pace is hectic, the sound-bites tumble over each other. What was once the quietest day of the week is now the hottest news property.

But does it tell us any more than we know already? And who cares anyway? The simple answer is that more people watch the Sunday political programmes than buy the "heavy" papers. And television more often than not sets the agenda for the rest of the week.

Forget Parliament. It is the parties' spin doctors and the Sunday talk shows that determine what we talk about. More than three million people watch Breakfast with Frost, GMTV's Alastair Stewart programme, John Humphreys's On the Record, and Crosstalk, hosted by Donald Macintyre, the political editor of the Independent. Probably a million more have begun watching Jonathan Dimbleby's show, and the same number listen to the politically driven BBC Radio 4 World This Weekend.

To those figures must be added hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more watching regional television programmes devoted to public affairs.

Given their franchise duties, television programmers are naturally keen to demonstrate their commitment to the serious world. But there is a longer shadow. Sunday TV also commands vast space in the Monday newspapers, assisted by its own public relations.Verbatim transcripts of what the minister said on Frost are biked round to every national newspaper before he is back in front of his own fireside - a gift to Fleet Street.

Not everybody welcomes the rise of the sound-bite sabbath. David Hill, Labour's communications chief, laments the "lack of dialogue" inherent in the confrontational style adopted by On The Record, and Tory spokesman Alex Aitken concedes that wall-to-wallSunday politics places a strain on ministers. Simon Brooke, head of broadcasting at Conservative Central Office until last week, has conceded: "By and large, politicians see the Sunday programmes as a necessary evil."

The political fixers have to persuade their masters to appear on the shows, and it is not always easy. One Smith Square apparatchik complained that they had to ring "half the Cabinet" before they could get anyone to turn out for a Sunday programme. Perhaps they had it easy. Sabbath notoriety can be a problem. Fellow diners with Andrew Rawnsley, the political pundit, were surprised that many waiters in an Indian restaurant in Blackpool recognised him - until he admitted that the Sunday repeat of A Week i n Politics went out just before a very popular Asian programme.

Format is vital. Labour's spin doctors argue privately that they prefer Frost because his questioning is less confrontational but more likely to give an outlet for a policy leak. They agree with one of the rules of journalism that "softly, softly gets more stories than shouty, shouty". Accordingly, On The Record is seen as an ordeal that has to be gone through, rather than a proper contribution to democracy.

The Brian Walden hectoring style of interviewing, so much the style of the Eighties, is now regarded as passe. "Humphreys is trying to re-invent it," said one spin doctor. "But it doesn't work." And a veteran political commentator added: "Brian Walden was reduced to interviewing himself in the presence of a famous person. On The Record suffers from the same hyper-activity. All those graphics. I can't watch it."

But it would be foolish to imagine that politicians do not rehearse what they want to say before Mr Humphreys gets hold of them. "We decide before they go if there is going to be a story," said one of Labour's fixers. "It's all scripted."

Well, not always. The spin doctors still talk in apocalyptic terms of Neil Kinnock's televised admission on Frost that he would give up nuclear arms and rely on a "Dads' Army" for Britain's defence. It wouldn't happen now.