When I was a small kid – don’t you just hate sentences that start like that? – back in the 1950’s and for reasons I will never now know, my family owned a television set. Very few people did. It was made by a company called ‘KB’ and sat in a beautifully veneered mahogany box with this small screen sitting in the middle and every time it was turned on and the valves had warmed up, you had to adjust the horizontal and vertical hold knobs to get a semi-stable picture. A small, dim, grainy, black and white picture that was easily lost and fuzzy sound – and it was great! And it received just one television channel which was, of course, the BBC.

When that died it was replaced with a great big ‘Ferguson’ box with sliding doors that was notable mainly for also receiving the new ITV station and went on to also see the arrival of BBC2. Wow – three channels! And you know what? From among those three channels, there was, a lot of the time, something worth watching. Drama, documentaries, current affairs, comedy, movies, sport. We had it all and much of it was pretty good – even the 1960’s slide into US imported shows that gave England it’s first real taste of post-war American life were not all bad.

So spin on nearly 50 years and in my living room I have a Sky box with a shiny big plasma screen attached and what? 200 channels? Almost certainly more. I really don’t have the inclination to count them. And virtually every time I turn it on and skim through the listings there is absolutely nothing worth watching. OK – the occasional movie it’s true and if I was a big sports fan I could probably stay contented planted on my couch 24 hours a day. As for the rest, the quality is so abysmally poor that most of it is unwatchable. And most of it, of course, is repeated again and again and again…

And the weird thing is – as my wife pointed out the other day – when we just had the three channels and could, most of the time, find something worth watching, we also dreamed of the day when there would be even more to choose from. Little did we anticipate that the exponential growth in channels would be mirrored by an exponential plummet into total mediocrity.