I may be pretty laid-back, but I do have my principles. I will not call a Marathon by its new name of Snickers, and I will not lie down and accept that ITV has bought the rights to Premiership matches and that we all ought to get on with our lives. In fact, I've twice been kept awake by sheer anger at how much worse The Premiership on ITV is than the old Saturday-night Match of the Day on BBC1.
Whereas the Match of the Day studio was tastefully lit, the mood relaxed and humorous, The Premiership looks garish, and the presenter it poached from MOTD, Des Lynam, seems depressed and out of sorts, as does his expert summariser, Terry Venables, who's possibly been given a hair weave to match the empty grandiosity of the show.
Maybe The Premiership was once shaping up to be a great programme, but then some executive said, "I would like to remind everyone that we are ITV, catering to a lower social group than the BBC, and therefore everything we do must be that little bit crapper", at which Des glumly blue-pencilled all his best lines, and the set designer reluctantly reached for his ITV Manual of Clashing Colours. Is this how it is? Or are ITV people simply doing their best but with not so much brains? Then again, take tabloid journalists. Is their style coldly calculated to meet what they imagine are the demands of the readers, or does their writing genuinely reflect their own personalities? Do writers on the Sun sit around in their free time making strained puns about the topless model Jordan?
The question comes down to this: are popular journalists and broadcasters manipulators of the class system or victims of it? I know the answer is complicated by those sinister third parties, the advertising executives. These obsessive pigeon-holers, with their ham-fisted painting by numbers, are always forcing consumers and creators in the media to be what they're not. As such, they are some of the biggest reinforcers of the class system, the irony being that, as individuals, they always seem quite classless.
They are part of the explanation, but for the whole answer we'd have to turn to a real expert in the field. Mr Murdoch himself, say.
