The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television

Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true. It wouldn’t surprise me if John Logie Baird was gripped by a feeling of revulsion and self-disgust shortly after transmitting images of his fingers wiggling up and down back in the 1920s, the first ever TV show — and, you have to say, a suitably banal and metaphorically appropriate debut for the medium. Television: a sleight of hand, which will tell you nothing. It’s just fingers wiggling.

There is maybe something intrinsic to TV that automatically commands our derision; it plays to our faults, as a species — our narcissism, our impatience, our woefully low attention span. Recently, though, the fugue of discontent has grown a little louder, and particularly within the industry. It is not just the flagrant dishonesty of those rigged phone-in shows, which you know all about — the tawdry money-making scams where the public was gulled right, left and centre. That stuff made one or two people within television sit up suddenly and say, ‘Christ, what am I doing with my life?’

Nor is it simply the BBC, or one of the companies which is franchised to work for the Corporation, stitching Her Majesty up like a kipper to gain a few more thousand viewers by pretending she’d had a strop. That stuff has had its impact, sure. It has, for a start, effected a sort of catharsis within TV executives — but a very ‘TV’ catharsis, rather than the kind of thing which might have been recognised as such by Aristotle.