(Dawn of the Dave – ebook on Amazon, now only 77p!)

My generation were called 'Generation X', unfairly I believe, by the generation before us. Basically anyone born between about 1975 and 1990 were said to have a very poor attention span, hungry for the quick influx of information, obsessed with the new wave of gadgets and games coming out in the 1980's - Simon Says to Duke Nukem to mobile phones - check out Marty McFly's son in Back to the Future II - (anyone in a relationship will know the nuisance that a mobile can be to your life, especially when writing).

This invented post-modern rot was pushed by the media and the governments of the day to justify the 'dumbing down' of the arts and society in general. Let's feed this generation with Neighbours, Big Brother, the horror that was late night ITV programming, MTV documentaries on how to boil an egg in your first student house. God forbid that people weren't actually suffering from societal wide attention-lacking boredom, that people born in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s actually wanted some depth to their programming, their art and their theatre.

It’s the self-convinced belief that the majority of people are feckless idiots that leads successive govts to marvel at A* A-level and GCSE results and claim that the exams must be rigged or ‘too easy’, allowing the MP3 generation to get into the universities that should, in ‘our leaders’ opinions be reserved for the offspring of the well-off.

What, in fact, have we seen in the last ten years? Programmes like Big Brother, ‘Celeb’ fly-on-the-wall ‘documentaries’, like lemon flavoured cola, have failed to attract people’s attention after the initial fizz and now sit as flat dregs on that enemy of all things interesting, Channel 5. The lemon is in the ashtray and the ice is melting in the glass. People demand more challenging theatre, cinema and TV – I’m sure we can all think of examples, and we’d all disagree on our favourites so I won’t mention mine here.

Could I be coming across as a cultural snob? Some of you may like these programmes but I ask why is the Culture Show pushed to the furthest end of the BBC’s schedules and Doctor Who (my guilty pleasure) and the lottery (basically an advert for indirect taxation) on at prime time? Your opinions please.

P.S. (Dawn of the Dave – ebook on Amazon, now only 77p!)