Why all the drama? TV deceives us every day

Those phoney quizzes were just a scam, like a bent fairground stall. But Grade has more significantly admitted that there have been cases in which supposedly factual television programmes have "effectively duped the viewers" citing the documentary about the Alzheimer's victim, wrongly suggested to be seen actually dying on screen.

For his part, the chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, has admitted the corporation faces a "big challenge" to win back the trust of licence fee payers after scandals like the one over Blue Peter's rigged competition. Sir Michael's background is primarily in local government, and it shows.

The BBC will undertake research into what people expect from their viewing, he says. In all apparent naivety, he asks: "Do people have different expectations from a piece of fiction to the news or a documentary? I think they do. And what do you do in that grey area where you've got mockumentaries and fictionalised history and so on?" Good question. Asked way too late.

The fact/fiction slippages are both a product of television's overweening power and the natural contempt this breeds for its serfs: the viewers.

When you meet people who work in television, you often find they're not keen viewers themselves.

Television distorts everything it touches. For example, my own little field of interest, books, is now ludicrously dominated by Richard and Judy, who can quite simply tell the nation what to buy and read with dictatorial certainty. For the most part, their command of the book trade has been wielded responsibly so far.

But they equally have shown they can make a huge bestseller out of a total dud, The Interpretation of Murder, almost as if to prove a point.

And then there is the insistence on the image. Television imperiously demands to show everything now. In my brief career as a television critic, I came to the sorry conclusion that there were, quite simply, no genuine documentaries at all apart from the natural history programmes.

Meanwhile old-style history or arts programmes that confined themselves to showing the real thing are all over. The past must be as viewable as the present, if it is to appear on TV.

Everything is now re-enacted without a qualm, Sir Michael might like to know. It's all a "grey area".

Television deceives us all the time about what we can know, flattering us that it can deliver us everything: dinosaurs, Julius Caesar, live death.

And it's not until flatly caught out by a trick that we're even aware any more how incessantly we're diddled..