Current plans to cut ITV’s obligations as a public service broadcaster would mean it’d have no need to fill the cracks in its open-the-box, come-on-down schedules every night with regional news programmes.

That would be excellent. I loathe regional news programmes. They’re always full of fat women wearing “Save our school” T-shirts that they’ve hurriedly pulled on over their normal clothes for the cameras, and pointless vox pops, and puffed-up councillors and green issues and plans for incinerators and recycled press releases, delivered with a solemn voice by a woman in an ethnic headscarf, in a bid to give them credence and weight.

However, while the demise of Grantham Today is a cause for celebration, I do believe this is yet another rivet removed from the aeroplane wings of civilisation, and soon you’ll turn on Newsnight to find Jeremy Paxman in clown shoes urging parties from either side of the political divide to settle their differences in a bout of mud wrestling.

Sadly I believe that television mirrors society. It was in black and white because we were. It made fun of West Indians when we did. It featured Terry Scott because we told lame jokes as well, and when we went to the pub, we didn’t like all that “foreign muck” on the menu either.

This is the problem with what’s happening today. Because anyone with half a brain and speech genes that function properly is derided as a hoity-toity snob, all of television is aimed at the Heat-reading halfwits who literally don’t know anything.

We celebrate our ignorance of the Large Hadron Collider, we make sneery noises when someone from Fulham appears on a game show, and as a result, when we tune in to BBC1 on a Saturday night, Vanessa Feltz is being pushed into a swimming pool because she can’t lie on the floor with her legs wide apart.

At the moment, television companies imagine that they must cater to the bovine masses or else their viewing figures and advertising revenue will dwindle to nothing. They know that when Jade Goody gets cancer the nation mourns and when Stephen Hawking speaks everyone laughs.

So they fear that if they do not make shows for pig-ignorant northern lard buckets the nation will switch off the set and do something else with its time instead.

But what? The internet? Oh come on. This is a horrible place full of lies, hate, pornography and a billion apostrophes, all in the wrong place. What’s more, eventually it will cause you to end up in bed with someone inappropriate, or you will upset a German who will come round to your house and stab you in the heart.

Or maybe the television execs imagine that we will all say, “Well, Vanessa Feltz isn’t falling into a swimming pool tonight so I shall read a book instead.” Really? Can you imagine Jade Goody saying that? Or Shannon Matthews’s mum? Or anyone you saw in town today?

Basket weaving, then? Or brass rubbing? Or maybe they think we’ll all spend our evenings embroidering kneelers for the local parish church. Maybe in Simon Heffer’s village. But not mine. Or yours. Or anywhere real.

Television companies need to be brave. They need to accept that because there’s nothing else to do of an evening, especially when money’s tight, they may as well broadcast shows that enlighten us a bit.

Unfortunately this is not going to happen, because shows are like nuclear weapons. Once one broadcaster is transmitting a Day-Glo bucket of primordial sludge to suit the average ignoramus, all the others have to follow suit. There can be no unilateral disarmament. They all have to agree to ditch Vanessa. Or it won’t happen.

And so with that in mind I have come up with a proposal for Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. Instead of removing the chocks of decency from the wheels of human degeneration you must stop thinking of TV as a mirror and insist it becomes a beacon.

Quiz shows should be designed to reward the bright and humiliate the stupid. Chris Tarrant must be banned from commiserating with the contestant who doesn’t know anything and encouraged instead to look incredulous. There must be debates on Ibsen in every episode of Coronation Street, and Stephen Fry will be made to appear on everything.

There will be peak-time Greek from Boris Johnson. QVC will be forced to drop the trinketry and sell fine English shotguns. And I want a show featuring Eton boys who go to a different northern city each week to laugh at the people who live there.

Ofcom must be made to remove the pink, the saccharine, the goofy, the idiotic, the cheap and the nasty and replace them all with Paxman. There will be no more traffic cops pretending that what they do is interesting and a lot more Kevin McCloud.

For guidance, I direct all of you to Harry and Paul, the latest BBC1 series featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. Here we find a couple of performers who presume the audience have a modicum of knowledge and a scintilla of intelligence. If you don’t know what The Duchess of Malfi is or how the Sicilian Defence can be used, you won’t get it. It is not aimed at Jade Goody. It’s not even aimed in her general direction. It is, however, even though they’ve been jolly mean to me, the best television comedy I’ve seen since Monty Python.

I’d like to think it’s more than an island for the bright in a sea of purple and blue snot. I’d like to think it’s a launch pad to fire a thousand rapier-sharp Oxbridge wits from the Footlights and into the comedians who strut about on TV these days imagining that they’ll get a laugh if they climb onto Vanessa Feltz and make her eat a centipede.

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