It was whilst watching what was supposed to be a serious debate on the state of the nation on a private TV channel last week that I saw just how far standards had slipped in broadcast journalism. Perhaps before I go any further I will make it clear that there is some good – very good – TV current affairs material broadcast, but a lot of it is plain dreadful.

The show I was watching was in Urdu, and whilst my Urdu is far from fluent I can follow most conversations. The content of the debate need not concern us and suffice to say it was about dams – but the behaviour of the participants should. It was clear that the anchor had lost whatever control he had in the first place and the ‘guests’ had him pinned to the backdrop looking like a rabbit transfixed in the headlights of an onrushing car.

There were two men and a woman on the panel and they yelled and shouted at one another as if they were on a street corner – which is all very well if you are on a street corner but perhaps not the best way to comport yourself in front of the viewing public. But then I thought a bit more deeply about what I was looking at – which was street-corner politics but transferred to a TV studio. These were people who felt no constraint by virtue of being ‘on the telly’. They interacted as they do in real life. In real life, sans cameras and producer and anchor, if they disagree they bellow and yell, interrupt, wave shoes and hurl insults at one another.

Then I considered the audience, and came to the conclusion that those watching would have expected the panellists to behave like this because that is how politicians behave; certainly at the grassroots and not infrequently in the various parliamentary chambers.

The sense of outrage that those of us in the chattering classes may feel or express is not mirrored by the majority of the viewing public. I took a quick and unscientific survey within my own household. Nobody thought that the people on the TV were doing anything that was inappropriate, and they were happy to see their elected representatives scrapping like cats in an alley.

Suitably chastened, I went back to channel hopping and noticed something else. Again this is purely subjective but it did seem that where political chat shows were in English in whole or part, things were rather more decorous; whilst those exclusively in vernacular languages were something of a free-for-all.

If all of this sounds like a call for a return to the days of a single channel and dull-as-ditchwater TV – it isn’t. I celebrate the diversity of channels we have nowadays – but lament the narrowness of their content and quality of their production values.

This is of course a youthful industry, and in global terms Pakistan TV is little more than a toddler – but my worry is that much of it is getting frozen in toddler-hood and not moving past the stage where it is considered de-rigueur to fling one’s toys around the playpen in order to make a point.

Perhaps part of the problem is that there are just too many channels; and allied to that there is not that much by way of material to go around and everybody is fishing in the same small pool of ‘guests’ – and there is as yet very little indigenous pure ‘entertainment TV’ beyond a few leaden soaps. But please -we’ve dumbed down far enough, let’s not get any dumber.

The writer is a British social worker settled in Pakistan. Email:manticore73 @gmail.com