Television - Satire is a two-edged sword, warns Andrew Billen

In the breaks between its programmes the BBC has always broadcast advertisements; it is just that they have always been for itself. Now, after years of producing crafted corporate commercials to persuade us that the BBC is what it says it is - a public service broadcaster that walks with kings and has not lost the common touch - the corporation has started to produce propaganda about what it isn't. Sex 'n' Death (Tuesday, BBC2) was a one-off, 75-minute satire on the excesses of television "in the very near future". Call us dumbed down, it seemed to be saying, but keep hold of Auntie for fear of something worse.

Sex 'n' Death was the name of the programme within the programme, too, a casserole of TFI Friday, Something for the Weekend and Candid Camera turned up to a rolling boil. Its presenter was Ben Black, a man with the attitude of Chris Evans, the voice of Jeremy Clarkson and the face of Martin Clunes (for it was he). A game-show host behaving very badly indeed, he offered £5,000 for the first member of the audience to strip naked, got the world's major religions to settle their differences in a mud-wrestling match, placed live crabs down contestants' underpants and promised Ulrika Jonsson's "split beaver" - which turned out to involve the magnificent Swede axing a rodent. His specialism, however, was filming celebrities making fools of themselves with prostitutes, particularly his rival in tat, Neil Biddle (Martin Jarvis), host of the no less egregious Just a Laugh.

A slight problem for the mechanics of the satire was that Sex 'n' Death was clearly a very good programme, with wit and production values unknown to the genre it was guying. But we shall let this pass, since we knew we were meant to be horrified by its prospect of late-night telly whose taste thermostat has blown. Black, who wanted to show a dead body decomposing in weekly instalments, lived by the mottos, "Everybody hates us; we don't care"; "It's no good unless you can watch it with the sound down"; and "We've got to keep pushing back the boundaries". Black is losing it, and so, we were meant to shudder, is television.

Guy Jenkin, the writer and director, set his dystopia in the world of cable television. This was both a clever and a stupid choice. It was clever because if any television is due for complete deregulation it is television pumped down wires into your home as the Internet is. It was stupid because cable television in this country is a lame and undigitalised duck. I'll eat my bound Barb reports if "Britain's top cable show ever" wins 10.2 million viewers in the "very near future" - or ever. The nearest cable has so far come to producing anything like Sex 'n' Death is L!VE TV, which closed a few weeks ago.

Nevertheless, some deregulated broadcaster will sooner or later attempt to take trash TV to a lower level than so far plumbed by UK Living and Granada Men & Motors. Audiences for the multichannel stations, even Sky One, remain puny next to those for terrestrial television, and a little outrage from the Daily Mail would help - although it will not, I suspect, succeed to the extent Jenkin fears. Many of the young, technologically literate viewers whom such programmes will chase have other ways of spending their evenings. The point about tabloid television, it seems to me, is the point that the next century will ram home about all television: as much as "quality", trash will be a niche product, just another choice in the vast Waterstone's and WH Smith store that broadcasting will become.

In the past 25 years - 20 if you date the start as the full networking of ATV's Tiswas - anarchic, rude, youth-targeted and sex-obsessed television has followed a progression: OTT, The Word, Eurotrash, The Girlie Show, to Denise Van Outen's Something for the Weekend, in which a teenager was invited on stage to guess, as they lay in bed in front of him, his parents' favourite sexual position. Yet at the same time, highbrow drama, for instance, has also galloped ahead, from the plod of the classical serialisations of my childhood Sundays, to the stately virtues of Brideshead, to the regular triumphant canters of Andrew Davies (so that there is, at the end of the century, a ratings battle between an ITV Dickens and a BBC1 Gaskell).

Nevertheless, Sex 'n' Death was astute about one thing - not when it was trying to scare us with the question of "how low can TV go?" but when it dwelt on the effect of over-hyped personality television on the celebrities themselves. Biddle ended up killing himself, exposed by his rival's prank. Black, whose conscience has not allowed him a good night's sleep in years, threatened to kill himself unless the viewers switched off their sets.

Unfortunately, the moment recalled Peter Finch's suicide threats on the very dated 1976 film Network, in which Finch, as the failing network news anchorman, achieved huge ratings by televising his own nervous breakdown. Television, Network and Sex 'n' Death believe, is an addictive and hypnotic medium we cannot turn off. Yet, as Peter Salman or David Liddement or any other of television's chieftains will tell you, people can and they have been. Viewers, especially younger viewers, simply do not treat the set in the corner with the helpless awe of Jenkin's generation, which was brought up in the videoless, three-channel sixties. For me, Black's suicidal taunts did not compare with the profundity of the end of The Truman Show, in which America's better nature willed Truman to escape the docusoap of his life. When the plug was pulled, the audience simply changed channels and forgot all about him. He was, after all, just television. Fun though Sex 'n' Death was, it made television's usual mistake of overrating its own importance. I look forward to a millennium of modesty from my favourite medium.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"

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