TV dinners

There was, for a while, some debate in academic circles about whether there was such a thing as cannibalism. According to a handful of anthropologists, it was a Western invention — probably unwitting — to discredit ignorant savages. It now seems clear that this view was, to coin a phrase, political correctness gone mad. There are attested examples of people eating other people, and not only after plane crashes.

But there’s no doubt that television eats itself. It nibbles at its past and chews away at its triumphs. In particular it likes to consume lovingly made programmes if only in the hope that this will enable the networks to create more lovingly made programmes, rather as some cannibals are thought to believe that eating an enemy’s heart will make them braver. On Sunday this week BBC 2 showed the whole of the first series of The Office, and stripped it down to see how and why it worked.