Is TV a cornucopia of crap? Surely no more than all Lloyd Wright-influenced architecture looks like a Soviet apartment block. What is it about television as a whole, then, that arouses so much ire? I imagine it’s partly to do with resentful perceptions of power – a hangover from the days when only a few networks commanded huge audiences, when watching the box felt like forced collectivity. There’s also that unwelcome feeling that TV is watching you, not the other way around. For many people, watching TV is not so much a cozy cultural experience as a combative one, an embarrassing one; like a bright kid in a class of dim bulbs, you resent being dumbed down to. BookTelevision, in particular, has been greeted by the academic and literary communities with some suspicion; some snobs love to snort that we are an inherently oxymoronic proposition, and simply leave it at that.

But you know, there’s really no one like a TV critic to lay on the lash. There they are, the champions of the people, all of them too smart for the boob tube. Have you ever read a film critic who dislikes film as much as, say, TV critics loathe TV? Or a restaurant critic who so hates food? What I find most aggravating is how, after howling column on column about the vulgarities of reality television, quiz shows, and the like, they will turn their noses up at us altogether because we’re digital; all the major newspapers in Canada, each one a part of a multimedia conglomerate, have policies (more or less unspoken) of not reviewing digital TV because it reaches a marginal number of households. But the dislike of television among print people is even more visceral than that. Let me illustrate.

The Observer’s former TV critic, John Naughton, is one of the few who’s copped to this in writing. Once, in the course of commenting on television coverage of the Chinese pro-democracy movement and its bloody suppression, he’d remarked on the increased harassed appearance of the BBC’s Diplomatic Editor, John Simpson: "He began the week … looking as usual like an expensive rubber beach toy and ended it like a deflated barrage balloon in a club tie.”"Later, Naughton has confessed, he read in Granta Simpson’s personal account of how a mob had surrounded an armoured personnel carrier, set fire to it, pulled out two of the three soldiers manning the vehicle and beat them savagely to death. Unable to maintain journalistic detachment any longer, he’d used his physical bulk to prevent the third soldier from being butchered. Which explained why Mr. Simpson had not looked his best toward the end of his tour of Tiananmen Square. Now, I’ve never stuck my neck out like Mr. Simpson, but as someone who has never worn a plastic wig on camera, I seize on this story to argue that it is critics of TV who are obsessed with appearances, not necessarily us.