TV, The Modern Freak Show

I'm not one of those people who thinks television is evil and satanic, I do watch TV. But I don't subscribe to Sky because Freeview gives you enough channels full of pap without paying for even more channels full of pap.

I love sport but prefer to watch it live and therefore spend a long time away from my beloved watching football, cricket and, whenever I can, ice hockey. So to sit watching sport at home on TV would be a little too much for her to accept, which I fully appreciate, so don't have any sports channels.

But I am increasingly disconcerted at the amount of seriously weird stuff on TV. I thought that was what the internet had been invented for.

It started with the soaps and their little announcements at the end of an episode that if you have been affected by the storyline here's a telephone number for The Samaritans or whoever. Do the TV companies not think that if a storyline leads to people needing a helpline then perhaps it should not be aired in the first place? Having said that maybe there are a lot of feeble people in the country and it's not the fault of the TV companies at all, I don't know. I do know that Corrie has yet to make me run out of the room screaming for help, maybe I'm just not very sensitive.

But then there are the seriously sick TV programmes themselves. I saw one series advertised recently that was all about ugly people trying to get dates. I don't mean people who were just a little plain or perhaps not 'your type', but people who were seriously deformed verging on grotesque. Tonight there is a programme on about women who are seriously fat and pander to the fetishes of some seriously weird men. When I say 'fat' I don't mean a bit chunky, I mean rolls of fat hanging down to their knees.

Bloody hell, this is 2012. If people were to read about these freaks being paraded through the streets in the middle ages, or the nineteenth century for entertainment they'd tut tut and thank God we are now so much more civilised. Except that would be hypocritical as we now don't even have to go to the village square, the freak shows are piped straight into our own lounges. Are we really as civilised as we like to think we are? I don't fall for this bull about it being educational, it's not, it's pure voyeurism of the worst sort.

And don't even get me started on that sickest of all TV freak shows, the televising of Parliament.