Lynsey Hanley complains about BBC TV in The Guardian.

Three years ago, we got rid of our television, depressed and driven to brain-ache by what had come to pass for peak-time programming on the mainstream channels.

It seemed that every day’s lesson to the masses was this: working-class people live on grey council estates and shout a lot; middle-class people are snooty and frosty and only truly human when shouting a lot like those people on council estates do; and there’s nothing in life that can’t be solved by a visit to B&Q.

…

Every so often, but not nearly often enough, the BBC remembers what it’s there for. It’s there not to target, but to unite, people with disparate interests. In the words of Huw Wheldon, the BBC’s managing director in the early 1970s, its role is to make the popular good and the good popular . . .

Is that what TV is supposed to do? I never knew.