It is curious, then, to hear that ITV is planning a spin-off of Love Island for the middle-aged. Contestants in the provisionally titled Your Mum, My Dad will be between the ages of 40 and 60, and will, says one insider, “know their minds” and “be capable of intelligent conversation” — these being “ingredients regular Love Island sometimes lacks”. At first glance, this sounds like the path to a more edifying show about courtship, given the emotional advantages conferred by age and wisdom. The average age of a contestant on this season is just under 24, and most of them have been criticised for being either shallow or boring. Presumably middle-aged contestants will be not only more interesting but less nasty to each other — they’ve gone through enough in life not to lose it if a person they’ve been coupled up with for a day chooses not to “pull” them for a chat.

The Sun has also reported (under the headline “RUMPY PLUMPY”) that the contestants of the middle-aged version of Love Island will have “normal bodies”. In some ways, this makes sense: many have voiced the opinion of 2021 contestant Sharon Gaffka, who recently criticised the show for overlooking “midsize and plus size people”. Many brands have cashed in on the push to diversify in recent years. And yet this season the bodies are tauter and slimmer than in the last few.

That same insider also told The Sun: “Times change and the current generation in their forties and fifties still care about how they look, are fit and healthy, into fashion and are ready to let their hair down.” This offers a telling insight into the logic behind the new show. Just as ITV has no interest in filming emotionally mature young people, it has no interest in filming unattractive middle-aged people. If they do, those people will likely, and bleakly, become laughing stocks. From the vantage of youth, 55-year-olds fumbling in a hot tub, however sweetly, are likely to be merely mocked. Twitter will be flooded with a new wave of memes, only these will focus on being ancient and desperate. Becoming regulars on the MailOnline showbiz sidebar is inevitable — and may be worthwhile for those contestants lucky enough to be labelled Milfs and Dilfs.

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Rather than older people being put on the show to introduce a new and more salutary spectacle of what finding love might look like, it is far more likely that, forced into the framework of 20-somethings, they’ll be baited to behave just as badly. After all, the principal audience of dating shows are the young, and they want to be able to relate — not learn how to do better. In fact, the show will still rest on young people’s ideas of coupledom: in a bizarre twist, the contestants’ children will work behind the scenes to get their parents matched up — in what will no doubt become a proxy game for their own youthful dramas.

The application of the Love Island format to older people smacks of a broader trend of infantilising adult sexuality. Emma Thompson’s most recent film, in which she plays a profoundly sexually anxious 55-something, who decides to hire a young rent boy to teach her the ways of the world, is a classic example. As reality TV, surgically-enhanced bodies and vast wealth become ever-more powerfully interconnected with the world of social media, concepts of beauty, attraction and love have been violently skewed towards a young audience, and public portrayals of the intimate lives of older people are being squeezed down to fit. No one wants to think about mums who fuck; they’re only interested in mums they’d like to fuck.

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This is a shame, especially for women. Not only are many women in their forties at their sexual peak, the hard-won accrual of comfortable self-knowledge and the ability to ask for what they want, amassed over decades, puts them in pole position for satisfying eros. Older men, whose sexual prowess will in most cases be in inverse proportion to their libidos, are also capable of more empathetic behaviour. Even dating apps — whose dynamics tend to begin from an infantile or at any rate perfunctory baseline (“looking for fun tonight: whose game?”; “No drama”) — have begun to capitalise on the baroque complexities of contemporary adult sexuality: “grown-up app” Feeld, on which 35% of users are part of a couple, is the industry leader for 30-somethings and older capable of articulating a highly specific cache of desires without repelling the target audience.

But Feeld, too, begins from the simple binary of a left or right swipe, entrenching the sense that a person is indeed the sum of their kinky parts, and that, if you just list the right things, you’ll get what you want. After years of digital mediation, sexuality and its subtleties have been overpowered, made to fit the screen. And the consequences of this aren’t just affecting young people anymore: they’re creeping beyond the generations that grew up on the internet. Sticking older people in the Love Island arena is no victory for them, or for love — it’s the opposite.

It now turns out that it’s not just the putative audience of the show that’s thinking this. ITV’s director of television Kevin Lygo (ITV have the controlling stake in BritBox) this week told a TV diversity session  that the makers of the new version have volunteered for advice from executives about how to portray non-white public figures, and whether non-white puppets should be voiced by white actors. Amusingly, Lygo caveated his remarks about these ‘surreal’ meetings with the customary nervous trickle of cancellation terror, apologising for the past sins of ITV and its lack of diversity

So, we have a general atmosphere of apprehension and doubt all round. This is just the kind of worry that’s famous for producing rambunctious, devil-may-care satire. One pictures Jonathan Swift sat immobile at his desk with his quill drying up, head in hands, wailing “Gadzooks, what if I sayeth the wrong thing?!”

Some background for the young. The original Spitting Image was the televisual incarnation of staggeringly cruel puppets, beautiful in their grotesqueness, designed and built by sculptors Peter Fluck and Roger Law. These were often seen in the press, illustrating articles in the Sunday colour supplements of the day, from the mid-1970s. They were political cartoons come to three dimensional life, and these were not kind cartoons or fond exaggerations. They are horrible in the same way as a George Cruikshank caricature of the 19th century. You’re certainly never in any doubt who the person is meant to be. The first reaction to a new one was always a visceral OH MY GOD and a nervous guffaw (a nervous guffaw is possible).

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Spitting Image began a few years later, in 1983. On tv and in motion the puppets became even more extreme. They farted and wept, sweated, belched and vomited. Labour’s thoughtful and cultured deputy Roy Hattersley became an incoherent windbag, constantly spraying jets of saliva. Tory education minister Kenneth Baker became an oleaginous head on the body of a snail, Liberal leader David Steel a tiny, piping-voiced nothing. 

The scripts (more hit-and-miss than we tend to remember these days) and their depictions of the targets’ characters were equally cruel — Princess Diana was a sharp-nosed airhead, and the mocking of her anorexia was a key joke. (In one sketch she is offered her ‘favourite food’ — a cloche is pulled off to reveal an empty plate.) Such rough-and-tumble moments weren’t unusual. This was constant.

People often call satire savage but it hardly ever is. Spitting Image was savage — a carnival of human frailty, in which people are little more than animals with delusions of political or celebrity grandeur. Nobody is worthy of respect or consideration. Everybody, of all political persuasions, is just awful. 

Can you see the problem with reviving this in 2020, when we are so much more sensitive and mindful of medical conditions, mental health and unfortunate physical flaws? The year when The League Of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh were pulled off the BBC iPlayer, and the stars of Little Britain and Bo Selecta have had to make repeated disavowals of their work?

Yes, every joke offends or disquiets someone, and in a sane world we would all accept that, tut and sigh, and move on.

But I find it uneasy to see non-white people portrayed in extreme physical caricature, and I’m a conservative in my fifties who finds identity politics nauseating. God alone knows what will happen when and if middle-class Millennials see this.

The history of cartoon depictions of ethnic minorities in the western world and the exaggeration of their facial features is a repulsive one, and you don’t have to go very far back in time to find it. In the days of the original Spitting Image there were simply no ethnic prominent politicians. The only ethnic puppets from the original that I can recall were Frank Bruno, Chris Eubank, Trevor McDonald and Prince — all of whom were sculpted with thick lips they did not possess in life. 

Now we have Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak as Home Secretary and Chancellor, and Dawn Butler and Diane Abbot as major ‘characters’ on the Opposition, and the Duchess of Sussex as the most highly contentious public figure of all.

If the new Spitting Image follows the lead of the original, what will their puppets look and sound like? By the old rules, Labour’s current deputy Angela Rayner would have to be depicted as a drooling moron that can’t get a coherent sentence out. (Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher, the undoubted star turn of the original, was never given any quarter — but then, she never asked for or expected any. Our current crop of politicians is a far less hardy breed.)

There is humour to be found in discomfort like mine, sure. A lot of comedy is at the edge of acceptability, and plays with our anxieties to release tension. But is fledgling channel BritBox really going to take the plunge, in a hyper-conscious racially charged atmosphere, to make the new Spitting Image, in the words of Roger Law, “more outrageous, audacious and salacious” than ever? And God alone knows what will happen if and when they should ever unveil a trans puppet.

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We are at a sticky, transitional point in social history, with women and minorities taking much more of a role in public life; while at the same time we are still very antsy about the legacy of how they’ve been portrayed in the fairly recent past. It feels unhealthy, especially when people with those characteristics are in positions of power, but we have arrived at a point where there are people we simply can’t poke fun at.

So my advice, if I’d been in those ITV meetings, would have been “Don’t even try to make this. Stop immediately!” Because Spitting Image in 2020, if it were to retain its original nihilism and scabrousness, would cause absolute meltdown. It would be a succès de scandale requiring balls of adamantine from BritBox and its backers at ITV and BBC Studios (which, to say the least, is very unlikely).

So my secondary advice would to be to do something else, find another way. BBC Three’s much missed and inexplicably cancelled Mongrels used puppets cleverly to be satirical, very naughty and very funny. We definitely need something to defuse and diffuse our tensions, and heated, angry Spitting Image ain’t it.

It is coming anyway. The new series will need to be written to an incredibly high standard with surprises and unforeseen quirks. It must make you gasp in horror at its nerve and cleverness, and ignore both old worrywarts like me and the woke cultural establishment. Its license to offend must be defended to the hilt. But let’s face it, it won’t. Much more probably, it will be timid and pull its punches, and follow 2DTV and Newzoids (no, me neither) into oblivion. Satire just doesn’t work if you’re afraid.

But this isn’t Britain in 2020. It’s the Village, the very unusual prison that a secret agent played by Patrick McGoohan is banged up in (and forever trying to bust out of) in the 1967 ITV adventure series The Prisoner. The Village is portrayed on screen by Portmeirion, the quite beautiful and grand architectural folly in North Wales created by eccentric millionaire Clough Williams-Ellis, and still doing very nicely as a tourist attraction and hotel. It’s an amazing place, on screen and off.

In the decades following its original transmission, The Prisoner seemed a gaudy curiosity, and very, very much of its time. It’s got the clashing brightness of much early colour TV; a jarring half-jazz, half-guitar pop score; and a jumpy, psychedelic mise-en-scene. It clearly belonged to a very particular paranoid Cold War moment; a colossally expensive remake in 2009 starring Ian McKellen seemed totally irrelevant to the modern world, and died a death. The original lived on only as a cult series, remembered more for the nostalgia value of its vivid iconography than anything else.

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McGoohan’s character (known as ‘Number Six’) is permanently angry, or at least tensed up — there’s nobody he can relax or speak normally with. This gives the show an intense, unrelenting atmosphere that makes it heavy going for some viewers. There are many things The Prisoner shares with The Good Place, but chirpy, flirty banter isn’t one of them. The thing most people know about the show is ‘Rover’, the giant white balloon which patrols the Village, roaring and heavy-breathing, and which often smothers McGoohan back into line to the accompaniment of frantic bongos and detuned electric guitars.

You’re never quite sure whether Rover is meant to be funny, frightening, a bit of both or neither. It’s a quality that sums The Prisoner up. To most people it seems, or seemed, a typically naff bit of meandering, a product of the time that also served up the Beatles’ rambling, almost unwatchable, TV film Magical Mystery Tour.

But over the last few years, as the public sphere of Western society has taken a very odd and unexpected turn, I couldn’t help thinking more and more of The Prisoner, and specifically the Village. While The Prisoner shares many concerns with Nineteen Eight-Four, it now seems that McGoohan (who co-created it, and wrote and directed many of the episodes) got it more right than Orwell — and did so in a Sunday night mainstream TV show with ad breaks, punch-ups and dolly birds.

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The Village is just the backdrop to thriller stories that are inventive and unusual, though they’re recognisably of the same genre as Ian Fleming or Len Deighton. There’s a whole futuristic underground base beneath the Village of the kind Sean Connery is always blowing up. And on its surface level The Prisoner works as a spy story with a unique twist, Bond transplanted into a totally oppositional setting. But that backdrop now seems by far the most striking and relevant thing about it.

Unlike the shoddy goods and deprivation of Airstrip One in Nineteen Eight-Four, the Village is an affluent society, an apparently quite attractive place to be. It’s certainly not a communist hellhole; no cage was ever more gilded. Consumer goods are plentiful, all branded with the Village’s meaningless penny farthing logo. People are punctiliously polite and convivial until the very moment somebody (and it’s almost always McGoohan) starts asking questions or strikes a sour note. Then they either evade, pretend not to hear, get nervous, or run away. “A still tongue makes a happy life” and “Questions are a burden to others” are two of the Village’s often-parroted slogans at these moments. Inquiries about the location or history of the Village are particularly unwelcome — it’s just ‘very cosmopolitan’ and ‘international’.

There are regular applause sessions for “valued members of the community” — “they do a marvellous job!” Art is there merely to reproduce Village symbols, and has no value as beautiful or diverting in and of itself. Even sport and play are ideological: there’s ‘kosho’, a bizarre hybrid involving baseball gloves, helmets and trampolines, or human chess, which is monitored in case anybody makes a suspiciously individualistic move.

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The parades and festivities are never-ending. It’s always Pride Month of a kind in the Village. A particularly good example is ‘Appreciation Day’, the climax of which is the unveiling — to much hooraying — of a stone monument that says simply ‘Achievement’.

And the Village is nothing if not progressive — at one point, during the election campaign, Chief Administrator Number 2 ends a stump speech by calling, “We know what we must do! What must we do?” A lackey holds up a board reading “PROGRESS” and the crowd dutifully chants it back. The recent ‘Progress Pride’ flag — updated to be even more inclusive, and displayed on the Twitter profile of the House Of Commons, for heaven’s sake — features a large red umbrella that’s so Village it’s hard to believe it wasn’t intentional.

Definitely the most eyebrow-raising episode in our current times is ‘A Change Of Mind’, in which McGoohan’s character is cancelled by a mob of ‘public-minded citizens’. A particularly heinous anti-social misdemeanour sparks this cancellation: he builds his own gym equipment and refuses to use the Village sports facilities. But this offence is merely a pretext. He’s taken before a ‘committee of social affairs’ and makes the very unwise move of mocking it.

Other miscreants who comply with the committee are made to give tearful public apologies (written for them) to the mob, including lines like “They’re right, of course, I’m inadequate!” The next stage is to attend a young people’s denouncing session, a kind of HR sensitivity course, which McGoohan sends up — at which point he is officially posted as ‘unmutual’, has his social credit removed, is officially shunned and marched up to the hospital to be ‘cured’ by a lobotomy.

The recent sight of Peter Hitchens being pursued down the street by placard-waving, slogan-chanting students was uncannily similar to the pursuit of McGoohan the unmutual by the marching mob. All it needed was the balloon to set the whole thing off.

Peter Hitchens strolling along so nonchalantly while a student mob harangues him makes for marvellous viewing. pic.twitter.com/x2O5Uamt0L

— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) June 17, 2020

I get the feeling the Village is very much where the elite institutions of our society want us to end up — a progressive, international community with no past and no sense of place, where we celebrate continually, avoid debate and difficult facts with mantras, reward non-conformity with ‘re-training’, and punish ‘Unmutuals’ with mobs. There is a large, and growing, blob of pure Village throughout our public life, and it’s seeping into our private lives too. Can you trust everybody in your DMs?

As Number 2 says of the Village in the episode ‘The Chimes Of Big Ben’: “What, in fact, has been created? An international community! A perfect blueprint for world order … this is the pattern for the future.” I remember when that line sounded a bit on-the-nose and quaint.

Can The Prisoner go back to being dated and irrelevant? Please?

We’ve never met, but we do have a connection. We’ve both lived in the same house on Heathbank Road in Stockport. The Sweets moved out in 1983; you moved in about three years later when you started working at BBC Manchester. Coincidence? Well, yes. Even David Icke would have trouble drawing a sinister line between those two dots. But it’s a coincidence that means whenever I clock you on the telly, I think of my mum and dad.

I thought of them this week, when I saw you on ITV, sharing the contents of your inquiring mind. I found myself remembering a taxi ride I took with my mum in September 2017. We were going to visit my dad after his cancer operation, and the driver wanted to tell us why he’d voted for Brexit. The EU, he said, was a secret plot to re-establish Nazi rule across the continent, and it had to be stopped. As you might appreciate, this wasn’t what either me or my mum wanted to hear at this moment. After we came back from the hospital I rang the cab firm to ask them never to send that driver to us again — rather, I suppose, as hundreds of people rang your employer this week to complain about you.

Let’s remind ourselves of what happened, shall we? On the Easter Monday edition of This Morning, your reporter Alice Beer was debunking one of the more exotic problems of the current crisis — the spate of attacks on 5G phone masts, carried out, it would seem, by people who believe them to be exacerbating or even facilitating the spread of Covid-19. You agreed emphatically with Alice, so I think we can assert that you don’t really believe that a virus can be transferred from bats to humans via radio waves. But the caveat you issued did leave some room for doubt. “What I don’t accept,” you said, doing that stern look I think you may have copied from Huw Edwards, “is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true … it’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.”

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I detect several problems here. The first is the idea that there is any measurable distance between you and the mainstream media. Eamonn, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the mainstream media. You are to television what the individually-wrapped Weetabix is to a hotel breakfast bar — always present, whether requested or not, and rarely the subject of a strong opinion.

The second problem resides in that little cluster of negatives with which you adumbrate your position on the limits of knowledge. There are, I suppose, an infinite number of things that we don’t know are not true. We don’t know, for instance, that you are not a homunculus operated by a highly-trained owl, though we would be suspicious of anybody who suggested this was a question that merited investigation. It’s harder, however, to push a proposition about corona and the phone signal into this category — or, indeed, any proposition about the health dangers of 5G — because, unlike the possibility that you are a bird-driven human simulacrum, science has already chewed this over very thoroughly, and found no evidence that any such dangers exist.

So I wonder why you said this? Perhaps you read a May 2019 piece in the Daily Mail, quoting the research of the Californian academic who described 5G as a “massive public health experiment”. (But, not, I’d guess, the subsequent article in Scientific American that concluded that his work “pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.”) Maybe you’ve been monitoring the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist brother of the former Labour leader, through which he shares his view that Bill Gates and George Soros have faked the corona pandemic as part of their bid to surveil the world’s population with 5G and cull it with vaccines.

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Or maybe you’ve been streaming the 5G-themed fireside chats hosted by the American writer Naomi Wolf, in which she declares that “there’s almost no objective reporting in mainstream media about the real dangers of 5G,” and warns that “your DNA changes to a precancerous condition when you’re around these cell towers”. Her own reporting in this field includes publishing a link to an approving account of a man named Mark Steele, who is convinced that Gateshead council is poisoning its electorate with 5G transmitters hidden inside the streetlamps. (No such transmitters exist.) Dr Wolf also believes that 5G may be responsible for the headaches and tinnitus suffered by her neighbours in New York. “Everybody who lives in my apartment [block],” she says, “is very much more uncomfortable.” I suppose that’s one explanation.

Conspiracist thinking thrives in anxious times. Corona has made it bloom like mould on toast. The Times caught two British academics from Russell Group universities sharing speculations that the virus is a biological weapon. A journalist for Metro announced that he’d submitted an FOI request to St Thomas’s NHS Trust, suspicious that Boris Johnson had somehow faked his stay in the intensive care unit. (“The PR timing,” tweeted Marcus J Ball, “is just too perfect.”) London Live, the cable television station associated with George Osborne’s London Evening Standard, made the bizarre editorial decision to air an 105-minute interview with David Icke, in which the former Coventry City goalkeeper was permitted to serve a Covid-scented platter of half-digested matter from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I’ll throw you a bone, here, Eamonn. Intelligent people are not free from these predilections. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis doubts the link between HIV and Aids and strongly suspects that he was once abducted by extraterrestrial racoons. So your willingness to leave a space for conspiracy theories on This Morning does not necessarily mean that you are an idiot. And such an instinct may not always be misguided. Conspiracist thinking can sometimes be virtuous. Ask Bob Woodward, who investigated Watergate, or Chris Mullin, who led the campaign to prove the innocence of the Birmingham Six.

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Those who engage in it, however, need to protect themselves against its corrupting effects. The philosopher Quassim Cassam is, I think, our wisest writer on this matter. I’d heartily recommend his work to you. He points out that conspiracy theories can reduce our confidence in knowledge that there is no good reason to doubt. That Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, for instance, is a bare historical fact. But if you swim in the discourse that claims otherwise, you may find yourself describing the history of the Apollo missions as, let’s say, a “state narrative”.

Likewise, there is no reasonable evidence that the 5G phone signal carries a health risk. But there is a discourse that asserts the opposite — based on unsound extrapolations from weak studies, which have been amplified into certitudes by unreliable commentators. Now, like the Moon landings, George Soros, Zionism, Pizzagate and Atlantis, 5G has entered the repertoire of things that conspiracy theorists like to talk about — and will go on talking about until, I suspect, the arrival of 6G.

On Tuesday, as ITV totted up the complaints, you issued a statement suggesting that your remarks had been misunderstood. You reiterated your rejection of any link between Covid-19 and 5G, but then, astonishingly, repeated your original error. “Many people,” you said, “are rightly concerned and are looking for answers.” Well, there are people think that the Rothschilds were responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, and we would know what to think of a broadcaster who thought such a view worth airing.

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Cassam’s book, Vices of the Mind (2019), notes that psychologists have tended to see conspiracist thinking as a problem of mindset. He prefers to regard it as an epistemic vice. A form of intellectual masturbation. And perhaps, if we think of it in this way, it might help to reduce its dangerous allure. So those inclined to regard you as the Noam Chomsky of ITV Daytime, critiquing the MSM between the Danone adverts, might be better simply to think of you as a man who gave into a weakness and discharged something unwelcome in front of his work colleagues.

Nobody would judge you for doing this at home and in private. Visit all the websites you please. Feel free to watch terms such as #soros and #EU and #fourthreich tumble from the hashtag tombola of Piers Corbyn’s twitter feed. And if you want to chat with other people online who are into this kind of stuff, then fine, it’s a free country. But for shame, Eamonn, for shame, not on the This Morning sofa. Not with your wife sitting next to you, and my mum and dad watching at home.

All the best, Matthew

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it’s incredible but true: ITV really does have a comedy department. A quick check under the comedy category on the network’s streaming service reveals that the only new British comedy programme available at the time of writing is Keith Lemon’s Celebrity Juice, so quite what this department is filling its working hours with when it isn’t attending diversity festivals remains a mystery.

So taking issue with this decision to man-ban seems a bit churlish – rather like quibbling with the captain of the Titanic over the band’s set list for the night of 14 April 1912. But it shows where the heads of the television establishment stand.

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Unlike the BBC, ITV exists to make money by attracting mass audiences. It was designed from its very beginnings to get bums on seats, the more the better. As the number of platforms multiplies and popular culture fragments into smaller and smaller niches, how can ITV best respond? I would suggest by concentrating on making programmes (such as Love Island) that buck the trend, and not by focusing on spurious diversity initiatives.

The writers’ room for TV comedy is very much a US invention, and it has worked out very well for them. Over there, they are essentially hothouses where writers gather to hammer out ideas, arrange them into episodes, structure the stories and craft the dialogue.

In Britain, the ‘rooms’ tend to be reserved for storylining conferences on soap operas, and it’s almost unheard of for scripts to be produced the American way – over days of intense conferencing, idea by idea, line by line, scene by scene by committee. For one thing, there just isn’t the money in the system to hire that many people for that long. So what we’re talking about here are more like long meetings where people pitch jokes.

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“Too often the writing room is not sensitively run,” Schuster told the festival. “It can be aggressive and slightly bullying.”

But what does she actually mean?

Telling jokes carries an appallingly high risk of social embarrassment – not for nothing do stand-up comedians refer to a bad performance as ‘dying’ – and a correspondingly small glimmer of reward. It is competitive – and about pushing at boundaries of taste. Putting writing of any kind on the line to be judged is never a pleasant experience. As a script editor on a soap, I once had to pass on adding one of the greatest writers of his generation to the team because I knew he would be torn apart by it.

But I can’t think of anything less likely to produce good ideas, or indeed laughs, than to don the straitjacket of sensitivity and the safe space, of watching what you say, which tends in my experience to create a working atmosphere with all the easy, relaxed affability of Act Four of The Crucible.

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Schuster’s comments are also telling for what they reveal about how women are viewed by this culture. Anyone who has worked in television for more than a week, and particularly around television writers, will be amused by the notion that it’s a group populated by thrusting macho men and demure little ladies.

There are two implicit suppositions behind Schuster’s statement. The first is that women will civilise the rough and tumble chaps, a view of the sexes plucked straight from an Edwardian drawing room. The second is that different levels of employment of the sexes in any workplace are entirely because of male privilege and power. I think there are more male writers for the same reason there are more male criminals – because men are on average more likely to do stupid, irrational things that have a high chance of ruin.

Schuster has founded a campaign called Comedy 50:50, whose aim is to reach perfect equity between the sexes in writing comedy. Encouraging women to write and removing barriers to entry are laudable goals. Schuster’s group has assembled a list of hundreds of female comedy writers, which is a concrete, valuable resource. An aim of perfect equity, however, is restrictive, an attempt to stuff individuals with wildly differing experiences and backgrounds into equal-sized pens marked M and F as if that were the most important thing about them.

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The writer Brona C Titley – fabulously for a woke individual, she has the kind of name dreamt up by the Carry On team for Barbara Windsor – told the Festival: “If you have the same type of writers in terms of race or sexual orientation or gender, then you’re only getting one kind of joke.”

What a limiting view of people and of her fellow writers. Men do man jokes, women do woman jokes, homosexuals do homosexual jokes, black people do black jokes. Nobody has imagination or empathy or fellow feeling. We are apparently parrots loaded with one set of phrases, defined entirely by an arbitrary characteristic.

There is certainly a problem with the same kind of people telling the same kind of jokes, as anybody who’s watched or listened to any of the multiple shows “taking a sideways look at the week’s news” such as Mock the Week will know – the people employed are overwhelmingly middle class and Left-wing. But nobody seems in a hurry to understand or address this most glaring lack of diversity.

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It’s also interesting to consider why this is happening now. The unspoken supposition is that television comedy writer is a prestige job with, in another grossly overused term imported from academia, a ‘platform’. But this is a shrinking sector, with fewer hours being produced than ever before: the days of ITV producing at least one half-hour’s worth of sitcom every night of the week – yes, younger readers, this actually happened – are long, long gone.

It’s just about possible to argue that the many tens of millions of viewers who tuned in to Only Fools and Horses or To the Manor Born were inculcated with monolithic cultural norms by John Sullivan or Peter Spence – but does anyone seriously think that coming up with gags for CelebAbility on ITV2 (highlights include the comedian Nathan Caton throwing cheese at people’s bare feet) is pushing society’s understanding of itself in any direction, and thus needs urgent gender representation?

This reflects a modern cultural quirk in the arts: an obsession with process rather than outcome. Think how often you hear theatre or television people proudly describe their adherence to quotas and fashionable nostrums of social change and representation as ‘important’, when the opposite is the case.

All art, even the desperately silly and trivial, is now regarded as political and with a mystic power to remodel society. The language of HR courses and inclusivity awareness workshops has cemented around the very daftest things. Somebody should write a comedy about that.

What is especially troubling about this genre, though, is its disturbing use of morality. The initial act of savagery is there to provide a moral justification for the otherwise cruel and immoral things the protagonist goes on to do. And it justifies our Schadenfreude. Or, to put it another way: morality is dangerous. It can easily exist to exonerate great harm.

Which brings me, slightly obliquely, to Jeremy Kyle and his now cancelled TV show. I absolutely share in the moral condemnation of the programme: putting poor people on trial, holding them up to public ridicule, exposing their faults and family grievances, all for the titillation of a baying audience. The psychological damage the show did to contestants was long-ignored. And I choose the word ‘contestants’ deliberately – because not only was the show all about contestation, but also because it adopted the format of a game show, recycling private misery into the financial gold of light entertainment.

But the really terrible thing about the show is how it allowed itself a veneer of moral justification. It sought ‘the truth’ – hence its routine use of lie detectors. And under the pretext of this moral justification visited great harm upon those foolish enough to submit themselves to the cruelty of Kyle’s hectoring interrogations.

Further reading

Why is punishment so popular?

By Giles Fraser

Perhaps Jeremy Kyle saw himself as performing a public good. That by exposing the truth at the centre of a dysfunctional family he was bringing about some much-needed restitution. That he was the righter of wrongs. But as I said, morality can be dangerous. Here, it quickly became an alibi for bullying.

The relationship between truth and cruelty is a long and complicated one. In their brilliant little book, On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor chart the history of kindness from its Christian and pre-Christian roots, through a radical transformation at the end of the English Civil War, and especially through the massively influential work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

“With Hobbes, selfishness and aggression were transformed from moral vices into psychological facts,” they explain.

Later with Adam Smith, selfishness was re-purposed as a moral good – a driver of the economy. By the end of the 18th century, apparently tough-minded truth-seekers understood human nature to be a form of enlightened self-interest. Kindness was just well-hidden egoism.

The historian David Wootton in his recent book on the Enlightenment has added further scholarly heft to this analysis, carefully charting the ways in which selfishness came to be justified as a basic truth of human nature. What we all really seek is Power, Pleasure and Profit, as the book’s title has it. From here on in, getting to the truth of human lives was always going to involve some kind of exposure, unmasking apparent virtues as little more than a nest of lies and self-interest. With Nietzsche, Marx and Freud – the so-called  “masters of suspicion” – human nature is again variously revealed as all about (will-to-) power, pleasure (sex) or (economic) profit.

Further reading

When did empathy become so dangerous?

By Gerard Degroot

So, by the beginning of the 19th century, as Phillips and Taylor put it:

“Kindness was steadily downgraded from a universal imperative to the prerogative of specific social constituencies: romantic poets, clergymen, charity-workers and above all women. By the end of the Victorian period, kindness had been largely feminized, ghetto-ized into a womanly sphere of feeling and behaviour where it has remained, with some notable exceptions, ever since.”

My beef with The Jeremy Kyle Show is not just with its swaggering machismo, but also – and not unconnected – with its total lack of kindness and human sympathy. It imagined working-class life as a Hobbsian war of all against all, a clash of grubby selfishnesses just waiting to be exposed by the fearless truth seeker. Kyle was never kind because kindness is a mug’s game, a sentimentalised simulacrum of benevolence that does nothing to uncover the grubby motives that are at the heart of human motivation.

And Kyle is hardly alone. With the advent of social media, we have experienced an epidemic of unkindness. The public sphere has come to be dominated by a digital swamp of Hobbesian contestation that presumes little good in our adversaries, forever seeking to expose the fundamental mischief that the other is up to.

Likewise, justified by the desire to expose, the political columnist is forever seeking to tell a grubby truth about opponents. According to a recent Nick Cohen column, for instance, The Brexit party candidate Claire Fox is “one of the most immoral people in public life”. I know her pretty well. She is clearly nothing of the sort. But Cohen just throws out this sort of nasty pseudo-exposure under the guise of a blanket assumption that he is exposing some hideous deceit. This is just flat out nastiness. As if kindness has no place in copy.

Why is the ascription of good motivations to people so often regarded as something credulous? When, for instance, do we ever seek to unmask people as being surprisingly good-natured?

I am delighted that The Jeremy Kyle Show has been axed. But there is something more to consider here than the demise of a popular daytime TV show. For so much of our public life has become dominated with Kyle-like presumptions.

Further reading

Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

Philosophically, we have been led into a trap. On top of the basic necessities, what most of us want out of life is kindness and fellow feeling. Yet we sabotage our own desire for a kinder world because we have all been sold the idea that human beings are all at war with each other.

It is a theme that Adam Phillips regularly returns to in his writing. We all want a kinder world, but are often just too frightened by the demands that kindness makes upon us – the demand that we expose and acknowledge our need for, and dependency upon, other people. For by admitting that we have a lack that only other people are capable of meeting, we acknowledge a great vulnerability within ourselves.

We are so frightened by this vulnerability that we prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Thus we make war on the very thing that could ever make is genuinely happy: the love and kindness of others and our need for it.

So perhaps ITV should be persuaded to develop the very opposite of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Not one in which people are exposed as nasty and selfish. But one where people who pretend to be hard and unconcerned are coaxed into admitting their own need for other people, their own love and kindness. Now that would be a show worth watching.

How Jeremy Kyle undersold humanity

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