Television - As TV takes stock of itself, Big Brother's future starts to look shaky, writes Andrew Billen The MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival

Every year, my editor permitting, I take a holiday from watching programmes on your behalf and go to Edinburgh to watch the programme-makers instead. The MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival is the industry's yearly opportunity to take its own temperature and gaze at its own navel. That it can do so surrounded by one of the world's largest cultural festivals and fringes is in itself remarkable - but then, that's television for you. If there is one thing of which you can be sure, it is that if there's a hit show on as far as 500 yards from the conference's favoured watering hole, the George in George Street, there will be no TV executive in its audience.

Unusually, however, this year I saw at least two sessions that could usefully have been broadcast to a general audience. The first I will return to; the second was a TV-orientated version of Question Time wittily chaired by Andrew Neil (incidentally, ITV1 should show some gumption and pay the fearless Neil sufficient shedloads to replace the ousted Jonathan Dimbleby as its Sunday-lunchtime political inquisitor). Among the highlights were the revelation that George Galloway had spent the previous evening watching, and enjoying, ITV1's X Factor, and David Starkey calling him, although not for this reason, a disgrace to humanity.

The panel, which also included Greg Dyke, Theresa May, Diane Abbott and Salman Rushdie, concluded by majority that Channel 4 should not get a slice of the BBC's licence fee, even though Dyke believed this was what his predecessor John Birt had been intending to suggest, in his disappointing MacTaggart lecture on the Friday, but had been talked out of. (By whom, he did not say, but Birt let slip that he'd recently repaired his relationship with Michael Grade, so maybe it was he.)

The top-slicing issue was the talk of the festival but remained a slightly unreal topic. Channel 4 is financially healthy right now and, in that trade-off by which Big Brother cross-subsidises Channel 4 News, still not shy of public service programming. The year 2012, when the analogue transmitters will be closed down and Channel 4 will have to compete as one of dozens of channels in every home, still seems a long way off. Some kind of subsidy will then be inevitable as compensation for its lost spectrum. Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, is resisting, aiming to keep the licence fee in return for turning the BBC from a broadcaster with a web-based operation on the side to the keeper of a huge, free-to-access broadband archive, with some broadcast channels attached - BBC1, for instance.

The surprise of the festival was surely the award of the Channel of the Year prize to BBC1. Its controller, Peter Fincham, honourably handed the gong to his recently departed predecessor Lorraine Heggessey, who then forgot to praise him in return. Unintentionally, one assumes, he got his revenge in his lecture the next day, when he quoted a journalist who said she had "bloody hated" just about everything on BBC1 during the past five years. But his talk was rather inspiring.

Fincham announced a natural history series, Origin of the Species, that it will take four years to make. He also acknowledged the need for a similarly ambitious drama project and admitted that "truly modern new forms of documentary and popular factual have in some ways eluded us". Comedy drama was weak and there were too many docusoaps. Despite its relative ratings strength, BBC1, he was saying, was not bloody good enough. And he is right.

The genre that was really in the dock, in Fincham's speech as at several other sessions, was reality television. After the fight on Big Brother last year and this year's sexual intercourse "sensation", a feeling is growing not only that television, like mankind, can take only so much reality, but that reality has got a bit too real. Not everyone agreed. Makosi Musambasi, the BB contestant who did the deed, was unrepentant, reasoning that sex is a part of life, and a more exciting part than eating pesto pasta (which she reckoned was us critics' idea of a fun evening). A Mr and Mrs Bye, at the same session, appeared grateful for the free advice they'd received on opening their bedroom door to Channel 4's Sex Inspectors. But Greg Dyke spoke darkly of his fears that something "terrible" would happen on one of these shows that would kill the genre for ever.

Last year's MacTaggart lecturer, John Humphrys, scolded delegates that their first duty was to do no harm. His phrase echoed in my mind during an excellent session on the gruesome subgenre known as cosmetic surgery telly. There were lots of laughs to be had from the clips of silicon implants, face rethinks and anus bleachings, but the laughter stopped when two female viewers on the panel spoke up to say they had become addicted to watching cosmetic make-over shows and decided to save up for a cheapo breast reduction and tummy tuck in Prague. The clinic was filthy and the surgery incompetent. The pair are still being repaired by the NHS.

"If," said Marion Jackson, "we had seen TV programmes reflecting that, we might have stepped back." Five's Chris Shaw, who commissions Cosmetic Surgery Live, blanched but recovered. He had an idea. Stand by for Cosmetic Surgery Balls-Ups. That's television.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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