Dishonesty in television may arise from lofty principle: but it still bears the devil’s fingerprint

My concern was born of direct personal experience. There was something rotten in the business of television programme-making, and it was endemic in the ethos of the small screen rather than (as TV bosses often prefer to insist) the influence of ‘a few bad apples’.

I have written about this now more times than I can remember, and come at it from many angles: repeating (because it has never quite caught the public imagination and I keep hoping that with one more heave it will) the same argument. My argument is that Beelzebub has achieved something more cunning than subverting a few editors and producers into immoral practices driven by ignoble motives. He has persuaded them that what they are doing is good, but for reasons that the ignorant — which is most people — will never understand. This the Evil One has done through the importation into their professional world of a subtly altered moral code.