The small screen is under threat from online viewing - and warring executives The MediaGuardian International TV Festival Edinburgh

For as long as I have been attending these talk-ins, there has been an apocalyptic feel to them. The most famous hellfire sermon was Dennis Potter's 1993 MacTaggart Lecture, where he warned that the BBC had been taken over by John Birt's croak-voiced daleks. But there was always something - Thatcher, or Sky, or new technology - that was going to destroy something, usually the BBC. Yet here we all are (except for Potter) and the BBC in particular is enjoying rude health.

This weekend's horseman of the apocalypse was, surprisingly, Google, which was said to have plans to abolish television channels - and possibly television - altogether and replace them with search engines and hand-held computers. It seems unlikely now, but I suspect that thousands of people's favourite source of moving pictures is already YouTube, and no one had heard of it until recently.

This was also the end for Charles Allen, the departing - possibly ousted - chief executive of ITV who gave this year's MacTaggart. I arrived too late to hear him and was amazed to discover he had gone down a storm. Gerry Robinson's blunt-headed hatchetman was actually praised for his wit. Having read the lecture, I can only conclude it must have been the way he told it.

The portrait of ITV he presented was about as believable as Narnia. He said in his interview session the next morning that he had left when he ceased to be a shield against critics and had become a lightning rod. Going now would give his brilliant new team a breathing space. This seems extremely unlikely, especially if the rumour was true that the board was now looking for a CEO who could persuade Channel 4's Kevin Lygo to come in as programme controller. Simon Shaps, the current incumbent, was seen around the festival trying to be nice, something that apparently does not come easily to him. (Another session on the power of celebrities and their agents spent some time trying to work out just how he had managed to lose Paul O'Grady to Channel 4.)

Lygo, meanwhile, was playing hard to get by being as rude as possible about ITV. He told his interviewer: "I am not talking about ITV. I know nothing about it. I never watch it." He went a little too far, however, when he accepted the terrestrial channel of the year award, saying he planned to show it to Allen, "So he can see what one looks like".

Allen had moaned that Channel 4 had become too popular by neglecting its Public Service Broadcasting remit . What he did not explain was why ITV had not come up with anything as compulsive as Big Brother or bought Deal or No Deal when it had the chance. Nor did he seem to understand that the way C4 fulfils its public service obligations is these days as much through Jamie's School Dinners as Channel 4 News. His suggestion that C4 should pay for its spectrum and make "a fair fight of it" would, of course, be a way to ensure it became as moronic as so much of ITV1 now.

Given the destruction of ITV1 as a serious channel under Allen - almost all children's programmes are to be axed and the days of regional news are numbered - I began to wonder if, should the doom-mongers be right and it collapsed in 2012 after analogue turn-off, it would even matter. Its once ground-breaking news division, for example, has lost so much authority that there is some evidence that viewers choose not to watch it when a big story breaks.

But maybe a miracle will happen. They do in the Narnia of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This is the new comedy drama from Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme of The West Wing. It is a show about a late-night comedy show that loses its satirical bite and then finds it again under a bunch of talented but troubled idealistic writers and a saintly president (I mean network head). It is beautifully written and completely away with the fairies. As Sorkin said in his Q&A session from LA, hopes are high: "The expectation of this show is that it licks global warming." Naturally it has been bought by C4, not ITV.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

Pick of the week

The Beginners’ Guide to . . . L Ron Hubbard
4 September, 11pm, C4
Comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli seeks spiritual enlightenment.

9/11: the twin towers
7 September, 9pm, BBC1
Eyewitness accounts amid a catalogue of security failures.

Time Trumpet
7 September, 10pm, BBC2
Last in inspired comedy series set in 2031.

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