Watching our television set tonight, there were people serving dinner to strangers, buying houses in the sun, escaping to the country, auditioning for Fifth rate talent contests, being cast as stereotypical expats, over the moon, gutted, wandering around gardens spouting Latin names in Yorkshire accents, valuing antiques, having DNA paternity tests, cracking jokes about an election fifteen months ago, and building enormous houses out of recycled polypackaging, earth sods and green oak in the middle of nowhere very interesting.

Oddly enough, the last time I looked, very similar things were going on. While there is a certain comfort in knowing what you’re going to get (a bit like Keg beer forty years ago) there was a time when you looked at the TV/Radio bit in the evening paper, and at least three things stuck out as worth watching or listening to….usually, all at the same time. This is rarely true today.

There is nothing at all new in this observation. But equally, there is almost nothing at all new on British telly – terrestrial or otherwise. Tonight’s one exception might have been Channel Four’s Dispatches, a normally first class news analysis show. But tonight, it chose to suggest cocaine abuse is rife in Premiership soccer. Given that soccer professionals are rich, and the rich snort coke in the roughly the same way that cockneys used to slurp tea, there was little or nothing new in this either.

There used to be a magic formula to whole swathes of UK television programming. Now there is only the formulaic: zero-risk, mass appeal, cynically packaged, and shoddily presented stuff at which the sofa drones can gape.

Last night, BBC2 celebrated QI in a documentary dedicated to showing how a good, intelligent idea acted out by witty, off-the-wall people with real personalities can attract and inspire a mass audience. The main man behind it – John Lloyd – is a great bloke, almost devoid of ‘side’ and – for all he is Oxbridge – a genius when it comes to producing stuff that the viewers must work a little if they are to catch up and appreciate it. John directed the best of the Barclays commercials using Rowan Atkinson, and most of the Blackadder series. Fearsomely bright, he is wonderful company…and a stickler for getting things right.

Five John Lloyds could make our television great again. They exist – I’ve met some of them – but they will not be commissioned. For they are over fifty, they understand engaging entertainment, and they will not settle for ‘good enough’.

And the way things are today, they’d upset far too many people.