I feel rather like a guest at a christening making rude remarks about the baby. I’m about to cast doubt on the attractiveness of a friend’s brainchild. And, given that the friend in question has the biggest brain I’ve ever encountered, that’s more than ordinarily risky.

Over at Comment Central, the 21st century, fully digital, equivalent of the old Algonquin Hotel, the place where the brightest wits in the world congregate, a curious innovation has taken root. Comment Central’s presiding genius, Daniel Finkelstein, he of the massive cranial capacity, awesome lobes and Premier League synapses, has introduced a new feature on the site – the “twofer”. Visitors to the CC page can enjoy two wits for the price of one by means of a link to various conversations that Daniel has recorded with other top bloggers such as Stephen Pollard and Iain Dale.

But, perked up as I am by that thought (of Daniel and Stephen in conversation that is), there is something about the twofer which troubles me. It reminds me of an invention long prophesied but never, so far as I know, properly delivered – the videophone.

I remember being told during the Eighties that many of the inconveniences we associate with modern life, inconveniences that have now evolved into fully-fledged bugbears, such as business flights, the long-hours culture of the office and road congestion, would be solved by the videophone. Technology would soon create a means whereby not just our voices but our faces, with their full panoply of communicative add-ons such as frowns, smiles and a thousand other extras, would be beamed across long distances, creating instant, intimate, virtual meetings whenever required.

And yet, for all the fanfare, it never arrived. In the past 20 or so years telephone technology has advanced in a way that nobody could have foreseen – from the answering machine through to widespread, indeed near universal, mobile use, to texting and other messaging. But while mobile phones can now carry hugely sophisticated video images, how many of them project the features of the caller to the called? How many would now even think such a thing desirable? The curious truth is that the videophone now appears, like a lot of avidly predicted technological breakthroughs, a curiously anachronistic concept. As technology has advanced we have seen that far from individuals revealing more of themselves in communication, they have retreated further away from open contact. The answering machine, which first allowed callers to be screened, the mobile telephone which shows the number of the caller on screen, the process of texting which allows one, as with e-mails, to control the tempo, detail and scale of any exchange of information, all of them are protective shields.

The idea of a technological innovation that leaves us more exposed, more open, which lowers our guard, as any telephone which showed our expressions during conversation obviously would, runs entirely counter to the direction of technology over the past two decades, indeed counter to the one thing that all this technology has actually revealed – the abiding human need for privacy.

Now I respect the need for privacy as much as anyone. But I wonder if the desire to evade scrutiny, to control conversations, to police access, the power to screen, and shield oneself, hasn’t warped society just a bit too much.

For the right we all enjoy to screen out the undesirable contact is now exercised much more frequently, and powerfully, by almost every organisation on which we have come to depend. Visit the website of almost any organisation, from British Gas to British Telecom, The Daily Telegraph to the Labour Party and the telephone number is never on the site’s front page. Find the number, if you can, and ring and you will find yourself in the contemporary inferno which is automated keypad pressing, call-waiting and digitally recorded voice messages.

Sartre was wrong. Hell is not other people. Hell is the total absence of any people at all when you want, more than anything, to exchange information with another human voice.

For, on all too many occasions, even the simplest transactions and most basic problems require a toing and froing of info which not even the most sophisticated automated filter can anticipate. And yet, try as I might, I still find it near impossible most days ever to get through to the human voice that I need in the organisation I am trying to secure a “service” from. It took me six working days earlier this month to get a named individual in one financial services organisation to call me back, and it was just as well I was prepared to answer my mobile to their “withheld number” otherwise we would never have made contact. Even though I pay this organisation hundreds of pounds every year for an exclusive (ha, ha) personalised service.

Now I know we all hate being treated in this way, and it convinces me that the future of services, whether public or private, lies not so much in the pursuit of a management consultant’s vision of “efficiency” but rather in a recognition that a more emotionally intelligent, human and listening approach is what we yearn for most. And I suspect that that’s why I disagree with Daniel Finkelstein about NHS reform and support the drive to keep existing district general hospitals. I am looking at the issue from a human, not a policy wonk, point of view. Maybe its something we could discuss over a twofer? I know I should ask Daniel if he’s interested, but I can’t get through to The Timesswitchboard.

Hair-raising vision of a balding cherub

Like millions of others, I was agog for the return of Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Although I have not followed their career from the beginning, in the innocent days of Byker Grove, let alone their boy-bandish phase as PJ and Duncan, I did cotton on to their appeal just seconds before they were ready for prime-time. I spent many happy, mildly hungover, Saturday mornings appreciating their mastery of live television on CD: UK around the turn of the century. And therefore I wasn’t surprised that they became integral to ITV’s mainstream output.

But on Saturday night I feared that I could detect trouble on the horizon which went beyond a few sniffy reviews for I’m a Celebrity or Saturday Night Takeaway. Unless my telly was playing up something rotten, I noted distinct evidence of a thinning thatch on Dec’s head. Dec (the fairer one) had his hair brushed forward a little, à la Prince William, and that seemed to suggest that the underlying hairline was receding.

For two stars whose appeal is intrinsically, boyishly, about freshness and laddish cheek, what might advancing baldness mean? For all those embattled ITV shareholders out there, let’s just hope it’s a dodgy aerial.

More cheap sneers

Oh, and just to round off my Saturday night telly musings, may I add that the commentary on British Film Forever (BBC Two) was classic lefty tripe. Not just rude about Douglas Bader last week but cynical about heroism in war, casually, cheaply, antiThatcher and Balliol JCR-snobby about popular taste. Why doesn’t the BBC commission someone who really loves great British films to pay them an appropriate, critical tribute? Why not get Jonathan Foreman or Andrew Roberts on war films, or Simon Heffer on Ealing comedy? Why is the default pose of so much pop culture commentary the sneer?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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