Seventy-five years after the UK's first TV broadcasts, has the medium been beneficial?
Bangor's 1971 University Challenge team: watched in order 'to enjoy the distress of the contestants who can't get the right answer'? Photograph: ITV / Rex Features
Boyd Hilton, TV and reviews editor of Heat magazine
A curious phenomenon is occurring each Wednesday. The BBC is receiving a lot of love. Well, to be specific, David Attenborough's current series is. Frozen Planet is so beautifully put together, so moving, so informative, that even those cynical journalists who routinely abuse the BBC on behalf of their paymasters for the simple reason their products are in direct competition with it are eagerly embracing the brilliance of this programme. The phrase "worth the licence fee alone" is being trotted out all over Twitter. It's also as much evidence as I need to win this argument. I'm already smarter than I was before I watched the first two episodes. By the end of show seven, I fully expect to be some kind of expert on the natural history of the polar regions. Frozen Planet is merely a wonderfully handy current example of decades of such enlightening content. Yet as we celebrate the birth of television itself (last Tuesday marked 75 years since the first regular TV service began broadcasting from the BBC studios at Alexandra Palace), I'm astonished to realise some cultural snobs still view TV as the "idiot box" and regard it as an inherently inferior medium. I could happily witter on about the awesome TV contributions of great intellectuals down the years such as Dr Jacob Bronowski, Lord Robert Winston and Snooki from Jersey Shore, or extol the virtues of hugely sophisticated dramas such as GBH and The Singing Detective, but I'll just focus on the obvious current weekly proof that TV has made us cleverer: it has given us Frozen Planet.Peter Conrad, Observer writer and cultural commentator
So to question the cultural benefit of television makes one a snob, a cynic and a desperate, derelict servant of one's paymaster? So any criticism is routine abuse? Perhaps the volume control needs to be turned down. I don't doubt that Attenborough in the Arctic is wonderful; it's just that I have other outlets for my love on Wednesday evenings and don't want to be wasting it on the BBC or wittering on about it on Twitter. Attenborough, who is about as ancient as the earth, is the single survivor from a time when the BBC did dispense "enlightened content" as a matter of course and didn't relegate it to marginal channels such as BBC4. But Bronowski's heyday was surely 50 years ago, when broadcasting did have an educational conscience. Would Kenneth Clark, who made that grand series on Civilisation in 1969, get a gig now? His lordly lack of glottal stops would alienate the youthful audience that television now wants to cultivate, and of course the very idea of civilisation has since come under assault. At best we have Joanna Lumley, with or without credentials as a cultural commentator, enthusing about Greek sunsets. It's not a medium for the discussion of ideas. You don't watch University Challenge or The Weakest Link to acquire information, but to enjoy the distress of the contestants who can't get the right answer; you don't watch Question Time expecting questions to be answered, but in the hope of witnessing a ding-dong. Jeremy Paxman and Jeremy Kyle are brothers under the skin, really.BH "At best we have Joanna Lumley"? Hmm, I might have to turn the volume up on this debate. Or at least have you over to my place for an evening of enlightenment supplied by my Sky+ box. There's more to TV than celebrity travelogues. At least you agree that in the early 70s (also the time of Bronowski's legendary The Ascent of Man, incidentally) TV was making us smarter. Your argument seems to be that it isn't any more. You list three programmes as evidence that TV isn't a medium for the discussion of ideas. I'll agree with you on The Weakest Link. I'll offer you three alternatives. Perhaps you missed Channel 4's recent Educating Essex, which last week showed us how a 15-year-old with Asperger's syndrome deals with life in a comprehensive: truly enlightening and inspirational. Or the same channel's four-part drama Top Boy, a richly detailed, eye-opening depiction of how young men living in inner cities can get embroiled in crime and amorality, based on months of research by its writer Ronan Bennett. And after your beloved University Challenge on Monday on BBC2, not BBC4, note, 37-year-old anthropologist Dr Alice Roberts told us about the remarkable growth of the human brain in her series Origins of Us. Not many glottal stops, either. This was all just in one week. Perhaps, like many commentators who have decided TV has irrevocably dumbed down, you just don't watch that much of it?
PC My "beloved" University Challenge? Did I say that I even liked it? Of course, with such a plethora of channels, it's possible to find good programmes – a grand total of three, at least. My point is that the mission of the medium never was to make us smart. It was required to do so by governmental decree, to justify its use of the airwaves; that was even true in the USA until Reagan's deregulation. But education was its alibi. Its main purpose was and is to sell stuff. TV has always been an evangelist for consumerism: it's a truism that the programmes interrupt the commercials, rather than vice versa – or else the two seamlessly merge. Every talk-show guest, even on the channels protected by the licence fee, is selling a book or a CD or another TV programme. All those cooking shows that encourage people to be what's known as "aspirational", and real-estate porn, another uniquely televisual genre, wants us to fantasise about self-betterment and then gloat when the deals fall through. The medium just seems to have taken over the world. Since "reality" is now defined as something that TV programmes are made about, the aim of most people seems to be to be to watch themselves on the plasma screen displaying some imaginary talent like Simon Cowell's hapless victims or exhibiting their craziness like the internees in the Big Brother house. Since the subject of Essex has come up, how about the sad and tacky estuarine wannabes in The Only Way is Essex, a group of kids – pretty representative, probably, of the audience that the advertisers target – whose heads are full of nothing but the television programmes they are mimicking?
BH I was joking about your love of University Challenge, sorry. Clearly it's the devil's work. I note your reluctance to recognise the value of television because you don't like The Only Way is Essex and the adverts. Maybe we should dismiss all of literature because of Katie Price's recent contributions and the profits of publishers. Whatever the mission of TV was in the first place, it has undoubtedly, obviously, unarguably made us smarter. Of course commercial television is trying to sell us stuff, but at the same time it manages to educate us, too. The idea that the great dramatists, documentarians and even entertainers who have flourished over these wonderful 75 years of TV have been primarily thinking about selling us stuff is patently absurd.
PC Since you define your position as "unarguable" – a shrewd way of either refusing to engage in a debate or declaring that you've won it – is there any point in going on? I'd simply note that those dramatists and entertainers probably made their names in the theatre, while the documentarians presumably began in journalism. TV simply gives them all a lucrative mass market. Signing off now, I have a date to watch Judge Judy on ITV2 – my favourite programme!
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