I spent the whole dreary summer in a sprawling East End hospital where every other bed in the ward (including mine) seemed to be occupied by one or other sickly manifestation of Alf Garnett. Home again in the sweeter environs of Ross-on-Wye, I now sit through Till Death Us Do Part with much the same tight smile of discomfort, embarrassment and relief which I used to feel upon being lifted on to the bedside commode. Johnny Speight's not altogether comic dialogue is at times so devastatingly authentic that I hear again the rodent squeak of the drug trolley coming down the passage, full of pills and poisons, momentarily interrupting the overlapping monologue of assembled Alfs addressing the unpalatable fact that three subdued Pakistanis had managed to infiltrate into the ward under the pretence of chronic sickness. We all knew as a matter of course that these cunning brown bastards were only there to draw social security payments, an argument which temporarily wavered when one of them so miscalculated his ruse that he actually went so far as to die. "There's yer bleed'n curry for you," observed my nearest Alf, not entirely without compassion.

I'm pretty sure now that Till Death Us Do Part has become by far the most popular programme in the land because it offers otherwise illicit opportunities for enjoying and even sharing the base prejudice of the British people under the flimsy guise of satiric comedy. The objections to it came in large part from privet-protected worthies who cannot bear to hear what they take to be their dearest principles rolled around in the dirty great mouth of an uncouth yob. Thus, an outraged viewer wrote to the Daily Mail to complain that he had counted 78 "bloodies" in the first episode of the present series - and I agree that we do not need to laud our Queen, our country and our whiteness with quite so much bad language. The Alfs in the hospital always modulated their speech when the ward sister was in earshot. If Speight ever applies the same self-censoring process to his own creation we shall be forced to see the programme for what it really is, a nasty mess spilled out of a gifted writer who seems to have lost control over his own gut reactions. The last two programmes were especially brutish, stirring together so many kinds of bigotry that they took on a manic hatefulness impossible to chortle away without some collusion in it all. I object, of course, from behind my own nervous privet.

But what is happening, surely, is that Garnett is gobbling up his own creator, bones, brains, marrow and all. Only Speight's tape-recorder ears are still unchewed. Till Death Us Do Part, partly composed in defiant bravado of the monstrous hordes of prudes and censors, has lurched in ugly staggers from what it began by satirising into the very thing, the exact process satirised. An awkward ambiguity of response from liberals has prevented them from seeing just how much the writer's stance has changed on the way to making Alf the hero. Speight is feeding what he set out to mock, hence his increasing difficulty in giving lines, let alone shape, to the subordinate characters around the central figure. Personally I don't mind, so long as we know why we laugh, if laugh you still do. There is room for a populist half-hour on the box, but there is no need to pretend that it is anything else. I still think the bald bigot is the funniest character on television, always excepting Philip Jenkinson. Indeed, I laugh until I'm (let's be exact) sick.

All last week on the little screen, spruced-up Garnetts were multiplying like figures in a funfair mirror, what with live coverage of the Conservative Party conference and Panorama among grass-root Tories in Bristol. A garage owner quoted "my old RSM" approvingly: more discipline (pronounced dis-kipling) is what we all need. Old ladies' handbags (violence) and quarts-into-pint-pots (immigration) recurred like a chorus. A Tory MP, face as smooth and pink as the Financial Times, informed docile supporters that "we don't have top people in the Tory Party", while another saw felicity in "smoking your pipe and digging your vegetable garden" as a substitute for the anxiety-making ideologies which so afflict the malcontents of the Left.

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