I am not a medical man — even my first aid knowledge only stretches to the use of tourniquets and staunching pokers — but I am fairly confident that no longer shouting at the television news is a sign of clinical death. Curmudgeons and furies have complained about the medium since Logie Baird put down his screwdriver and said, “There!”. But lately even balanced individuals with perfectly happy home lives must have found it all but impossible not to throw their dinner at the relentless cavalcade of idiocy slopped up nightly.

Over the past few years there has been a marked and depressing slide towards stupid, simplistic and downright insulting presentation, most of which is predicated on the fear that if it isn’t all whizzbang and tinselly we poor boobs will refuse to watch it. Never mind the body count, they seem to be saying, check out the graphics.

The apotheosis of this is ITV’s early evening bulletin in which a big, tall man and a little, pretty lady stand inside a giant pretend clock and try to make out that this is a credible way to go about their business. They talk in the kind of tabloidese that merely belittles its readers when printed in a redtop paper but when used as spoken communication between one living creature and another sounds downright insane. This irritation is exacerbated by the presenters only being able to adopt two tones of voice:

The first is the kind employed by overly patient care nurses breaking bad news to patients of impenetrable senility and deafness — so much so, that you half expect the news anchors to offer you a mug of cocoa at the end of the programme. This has the effect of making all news story sound as though you had better make your peace with your loved ones, set your affairs in order and check the Book of Revelation for the the evening’s programme of events. The second tone, reserved for entertainment stories, is the kind of knowing, matey, verbal smirk that would aggravate the Dalai Lama into inviting you to step outside.

The programme’s greatest and most worrying sin, however, is the astonishing propensity of those involved to editorialise. As a rule of thumb, I believe that the word “evil” should only appear in news bulletins in the context of the reporting of direct quotes, or with the word “Knievel” immediately after it. It has no place in headlines. Perhaps they use the word “evil” to alleviate our busy schedules by making all our moral judgments for us, or perhaps they simply don’t trust us to understand that car-bomb attacks in busy marketplaces are to be deplored, but either way they are lucky that we haven’t marched up Gray’s Inn Road to ITN with flaming torches and an indefatigable sense of righteousness.

The source of the problem is the belief held by the television industry that programmes must be accessible to everyone. This in itself is not a terrible idea, although it often results in television with the consistency and charm of a bladder full of porridge. However, when combined with another, albeit unspoken, belief — that the public at large have the attention span and understanding of a particularly difficult toddler — it is deadly to news programming. The whole thing becomes a pantomime for the hard of thinking.

Correspondents “interact” with fatuous computer-generated graphics for visual interest and open their reports as though they were pitching a novel to Dan Brown’s publisher (“This morning dawned like any other for the villagers of Todmorden. But only two miles away a broken-hearted father-of-three had finally snapped . . ”). Deskless anchorpersons stride about the place dwarfed by Brobdingnagian pictures of power players and ne’er-do-wells so that we don’t find the whole thing too static.

Worst of all, though, is the constant whining for us to get in touch. Is there any more futile phrase in English than “text us your views”? We don’t have time for this. Seriously, ITV news isn’t long enough to tell us what’s happening in the world as it is, so the last thing we need is to waste time exploring Geoff from Grimsby’s idiosyncratic take on the petrol crisis. “Text us your views,” indeed. I say, if you can adequately express your views on, say, the crisis in the Middle East in less than the 180-character maximum of a text message, you don’t deserve a vote.

What can you do about it? Get your news from the net instead. That’ll teach them. Such abandonment is, of course, exactly what the new-style news bulletins are trying to prevent, but for me at least they have failed. There are only so many times you can grit your teeth as your intelligence is insulted, and, perhaps more importantly, there are only so many times you can stomach paying a man to come to get your dinner out of your carpet.

Chris Addison’s series The Ape that Got Lucky begins on Radio 4 on Thursday, March 2, at 6.30pm

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