Perhaps we are ashamed of the hold it has on us - or, if not on us, then on the nation at large. It is Vanessa Feltz in Celebrity Big Brother and poor Darius, dumped from Popstars and then dumped on by the world and its mother. It is the awful sight of those cattle and sheep being slung onto funeral pyres with echoes of Viking burials, medieval plagues, terrible massacre. It's a state of mind and body that we do not resent so much in an uncomfortable theatre, say, watching a depressingly poor play but which easily moves us to guilt if we are on the couch watching an excellently scripted edition of Morse. In a sense, by trivialising the medium, we can trivialise the message, and that, I believe, is what is really going on in our relationship with television.
Television is a force which seems to threaten their hold on the reins.
Yet television does not threaten older forms. It often gives them new life. The history of television is very like that of other new media. Thus the novel, which began life in the fertile gutters of melodrama and sensation, was dismissed as a gross intruder into the salon of letters until great practitioners and passionate readers simply swept it into power. A parallel story describes the early cinema.