How TV Ruined Your Life - Telly Talk

Telly Talk: My journey towards writing this TV review began at 10pm last night when I sat down to watch satirist and critic Charlie Brooker once again try to bite off the hand that feeds him.

Over previous weeks he's looked at how television has tried to scare us, or made us jealous of lifestyles we can never have, and now he's moved on to "How TV ruined your life by actually trying to tell you stuff".

Which is why we're talking about journeys - nowadays, said Brooker, every celeb in the country seems to get a TV documentary, from Ross Kemp in Afghanistan to Joanna Lumley talking about cats, and they often start with the dread words 'My journey began...". It's as if producers think people can't cope with anything mildly complex, so they bring in a celeb, personalise the story and take out anything mildly difficult - you know, like facts.

But it wasn't always thus. Who knew that TV news started off by showing only static pictures? Back then they thought moving images would distract the viewer's attention, so TV news was not very televisual at all. But at least it gave you facts and tried to explain what was going on.

Flash forward to now - bombastic graphics, rolling news coverage and a blurring of the line between fact and fiction, with people, and their feelings, becoming the story. These days it's sensation rather than the actual event that gets the air time.

He makes a good point, although I don't really know why he makes it. It's nice to have real anger about the way the medium is going, but what does it do? We know that TV is dumbed down and patronising, we know it chases after the lowest common denominator, but it's not going to change, is it? It can only get worse.

Still, it has some way to go if it wants to get worse than Deadliest Warrior, the frankly terrifying docu-something that, like Top Trumps, pits history's most brutal warriors against each other.

Brooker showed a clip from the tasteful edition which saw the Waffen SS take on the Viet Cong, with the Nazi winning because he had a flame-thrower.Go Nazi, he cheered, and you couldn't blame him.

How much worse can TV get? Honestly, they'll be getting Danny Dyer to host these things soon.

They have? Lordy. We're doomed.