While flagship documentaries like Panorama are consigned to the God slot, light entertainment is hailed as having something educative and worthwhile to offer the audience. Conflating entertainment with quality documentaries, drama or current affairs programmes that challenge, investigate, expose and educate, does nobody any favours. You've Been Framed to expand your mind. The real dumbing down is expressed by those in TV who believe that an audience is capable of digesting only entertainment, all the time. Those at the top of TV have lost faith in their capacity to shape their own audience, by presenting people with challenging, enlightening, inaccessible programmes that demand work, but offer longer term rewards.
Instant gratification is demanded of the most unlikely programmes.
So sit back, guilt-free, in front of as much trash TV as you want, and don't feel obliged to glean all sorts of valuable knowledge from the experience. But for the more exhilarating intellectual challenges, TV offers increasingly thin gruel. It is not Bazalgette and his ilk who are to blame for this, but their big brothers in the world of serious documentaries.