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.