On the death of the South Bank Show

The death of the South Bank Show after 30 years is another nail in the coffin for what used to be called, even a little over 10 years ago, arts TV. Yes, broadcasters even had arts departments that would commission and make arts programmes. But these are luxuries not fit for the new age of austerity. Furthermore, ITV has been paddled further up shit creek by Michael Grade who continues what he began at Channel 4 by chasing the money and audiences and finding neither. The BBC will continue to be salami sliced into obscurity. While Channel 4, created with a remit to be independent and different will likely soon merge with Five and the sad thing is, no one will notice any difference.

It's another sign of the death of television, an old medium, which like a fish rots from the head. Out go the arts series, the serious documentaries and news investigations until we're left with a smelly corpse of reality TV shows and the festering maggots of low-life celebs sliming around.

If you want culture – you've got the X Factor. In a sobering way this tells you all you need to know about our culture. No better now than when spectators in the arena cheered and mocked gladiators as they were torn apart. In a world where torture is the new rock n roll. We'll watch anything so long as it has victims and we can enjoy their suffering.

Our problem is that compassion is out of fashion. A generation of people have been weaned on television and learned their emotions from it, as we were warned in the 1976 film Network. We see but don't feel. Sensory learning has been mediated by the TV; the latex gloves around our minds. Watching a celebrity in the jungle with their head in a transparent box having bugs dropped on their head is entertainment. The same technique, authorised by lawyers, is used to torture suspects. No, 'I'm a celebrity ...' is not torture, it's harsh interrogation.

But we are all complicit in torture. Myself more than most. I have performed in these victim humiliation shows. I've poured poo on people's heads and humiliated people in the name of entertainment. I was a performer in television series like Balls of Steel and Experimental. The scary thing is, how happy people are to be put through it, so long as they get the chance to appear on the screen.

Shows like 24 and Spooks persuade us that torture works and we damn well need to do it to protect ourselves because there is a terrorist hiding with a dirty bomb in every suburb. The only safe thing to do is stay at home and watch TV. Worship the flat screen that has gotten bigger and higher in the smaller eco-homes we live in. When I was growing up people used to look down on the TV, physically - it was on a low corner table stand. Now they're on the bloody walls, above fireplaces, even on ceilings so you don't even have to rise up from your comfy slab. Hundreds of channels, 24 hours a day, so there's always something more distracting to find as you channel flick you attention span down to a microsecond.

The people who make TV don't watch it. How could they? It isn't about programmes, it's a money trench. It has always been a licence to print money. Very lucrative advertising revenues for one side, or a monopolistic household tax for the other. Now the dinosaurs of commercial TV shriek as they get a chill from declining ad revenues. They run around like headless chickens unable to do anything more creative than sack people.

The same free market that gave you hundreds of channels, reduced the ownership behind the media to a handful of international companies that couldn't give a fig about their effect of society. You're not only buying the cars and shampoos in the adverts, but you're buying into the bland lifestyles advertised in the programmes. The wreckless consumer culture that must continue at all costs. Lets face it. Television is the greatest form of social control ever invented second only to money.

Never mind that scientific studies have found that watching TV – and I'm summarising here – makes people violent, unhappy, fat and cretinous. You can read the research for yourself in the book 'Remote Controlled' by Aric Sigman.

So the demise of the South Bank Show is one less reason to have a TV. I stopped my satellite subscription exactly a year ago and from there it has been relatively easy to wean myself off the 4 ½ channels that remain.

I'd like to think the death of quality television does us a service. Further exposing that just as the emperor has no clothes; the channels have no programmes. It was the little boy in the story that pointed out the truth. But now children are raised in a TV wrapper. Cbeebies in the morning rising up like a shadow to meet them, replacing the parents as the font of knowledge. Their brains being wired by TV, entranced by the flicker refresh rate of the screen while learning that the characters on the TV have all the fun so that you don't have to. Switch it off before you self destruct.