John Humphrys addresses two connected themes. First, bad television has become ‘damaging. Meretricious. Seedy. Cynical’ and harms society; second, if journalists engage in self-censorship post-Hutton this will harm democracy. The Hippocratic Oath offers a sound principle for broadcasters and journalists – ‘First do no harm’.

Humphrys invited sixteen Channel Controllers to send him ten tapes illustrating the ‘case for television’. Having watched them, he concluded that the ‘best television’ is ‘better than ever’ but the worst has become preoccupied with sex, confrontation, aggression and violent language, ‘even in the soaps’. Reality TV is the real culprit. It turns ‘human beings into freaks for us to gawp at’ and, significantly, ‘erodes the distinction between the public and the private’. Three defences are offered. The ‘Blue Planet’ defence emphasises the availability of quality programming, market apologists claim they are simply meeting public demand for certain kinds of programmes, while the ‘no brow’ argument suggests that programming should no longer be classified into high or low brow, but simply as ‘no brow’. But Humphrys argues that good television ‘cannot pay the dues of the bad when the bad is indefensible’. Ofcom should intervene to prevent the supply of these ‘debit goods’ on terrestrial services in much the same way that it attempts to secure the provision of ‘merit goods’.