I was rubbish

Did any of you catch me being rubbish on BBC4 last week? I was one of the talking heads on a series called TV on Trial, where various critic types argued over which of the past six decades produced the best TV.

My job was to be rude about the Eighties, with David Aaronovitch defending them. Aaronovitch used to be on my death list because he always comes across as such a po-faced lefty bastard, but as it turned out he was really charming and I liked him a lot. Plus, he was way, way more fluent than me.

But, then, he had a much easier job. How do you plausibly argue that the decade which yielded Brideshead Revisited, The Singing Detective, Blackadder, Edge of Darkness and Countdown was TV’s darkest hour? You can’t, really, though I did point out that this was the period when TV first began surrendering Reithian values to the market (Roland Rat; wall-to-wall game shows and soaps), and when it replaced dignity and objectivity with a mix of hectoring piety (Live Aid; Comic Relief) and left-wing radicalism (Death on the Rock, Maggie’s Militant Tendency; virtually anything made for minorities on Channel 4).