The Media Column: 'What has dull, samey British television ever done for us?'

There is a scene in the film Monty Python's Life of Brian that I can never quite get out of my head. Brian has been mistaken for the Messiah and followed home by a multitude, which then assembles outside his window. He attempts to persuade these unwanted disciples to go away, but every word he utters, they repeat.

"You're all different!" he tells them, desperately. "We're all different!" they echo.

Then comes one tiny, reedy voice: "I'm not!"

When Mark Thompson, new chief executive of Channel 4, gave the MacTaggart lecture up in Edinburgh last Friday, his audience would have been composed of both the industry bigwigs and – more important – many independent producers. For those producers, Thompson is their Brian. They will have been interested (if not alarmed) to hear him describe much of the television they make as "dull, mechanical and samey". They will have sat there nodding as he advocated "bringing iconoclasm and difference to a wide audience, challenging them with ideas and faces they probably won't come across in their daily lives..." And – even as they assured themselves and one another that they were all really icon-smashers, if not indeed media outlaws of the most outrageous kind – they will have tried to work out what on earth he meant.

Every year, there's a new controller or head or chief executive of something or other, who comes to Edinburgh and lets fly with a few words defining the programming they want on their channel. And, every year, producers file past this person, as he or she stands waving on the podium, and try to puzzle out what kind of programmes the boss class really wants. What does BBC 2's Jane Root mean by "edgy"? Is it the same "edgy" as Tim Gardam at Channel 4 wants, or a different sort of "edgy"? After all, no commissioner ever actually comes out and says, "What I really need this year is a series of programmes that are dull, mechanical and samey, please. Oh, and cheap."

And yet that is what – Thompson says – is produced. How does that happen? Why has "the best television in the world" become, according to one of its great princes, too predictable and uncreative?

Last year, BBC 1 produced what may well be the most samey and mechanical programme of the decade, called Celebrity Sleepover, in which a minor celebrity went to stay with an "ordinary" family for a night. The idea was ghastly, and yet the BBC governors sounded almost surprised when, in their annual report, they criticised the programme. It was as though there had been some terrible accident, and the show had just careered off the adjacent A40(M) and crashed into TV Centre.

Let's think it through. Someone had the idea; someone else (someone important) looked at the idea and commissioned it. For money. Thompson provided part of the explanation when he talked about the "modern, technocratic risk-aversion of the schedule". Again, the language is interesting. It suggests that scheduling is somehow a beast that has escaped from its cage and is biting the poor controllers, forcing them to abandon their creative instincts in order to conform to the needs of the schedulers. But this is rubbish – the schedulers are employed by the controllers, and not the other way around. So, when the BBC 1 schedulers said (as they probably did), "We need a light celeb show to go against Carol Vorderman's 'Water Features' at 7.30pm," the controller could easily have said, "Get thee behind me, Samey." But she didn't.

Back to Brian. In his speech, Thompson criticised a "pervasive sense of predictability". But then went on to say that Big Brother (which has just finished its third series) was a programme that "...evolves: each year it's felt like a different show."

No, it hasn't. But it has been a phenomenal and (if one is honest) slightly disturbing success. It is now part of the TV establishment, spawning imitations at a horrible rate. Any true innovator, of course, any real iconoclast – like the voice at the back of Brian's multitude – would be suggesting to Thompson that now is the time to smash this new icon and the psychology that begat it.

Pffffff. Don't hold your breath.

david.aaronovitch@btinternet.com