This is television's golden age

Present Tense:Will you watch tomorrow night's Celebrity Big Brotherfinal? Yes? Then you, sir, are an idiot.

That, anyway, is what much of the media comment has suggested. Coverage that's told you that Celebrity Big Brother is the epitome of television's dumbing down; a representation of a culture that has lost its standards, its sense of decency; that revels in cruelty and voyeurism. If you watched it, by extension, you are being sucked down an intellectual garbage chute. It's dark down there. You will starve for cerebral nourishment.

And it's a place into which television's golden age does not penetrate.

The problem is that when you look back in search of that distant glow, you find yourself having to squint very hard indeed. Look through the television listings from this week 20 years ago, for instance, and you'll find the small selection of channels bunged up with episodes of Dallas, Dynasty and The Colbys. These were the dominant series of their era, reflecting something of their time, but not likely to get honourable mention when the medals are being pinned on the chest of 20th-century culture.

Flick further back in those listings. To the 1970s, say. Was this an age when television was edifying and culturally enriching? Occasionally. But you were as likely to stumble upon en episode of It Ain't Half Hot Mum, with blacked-up actors and gags based largely on the profound hilarity of the Indian accent. Or The Black and White Minstrel Show, with blacked-up singers. Or The Comedians, in which black comics such as Charlie Williams could only get on the box by offering themselves up as sacrifices to bigotry, making jokes about "darkies" and how he'd left himself too long in the oven.

You want dumb? Television from the 1970s will leave you dumbstruck.

In each era, it might be pointed out, there was brave, thoughtful and groundbreaking television: documentaries, arts, political discussion, plays. But you could get that this week too. If you didn't want to watch Celebrity Big Brother, you could have instead watched a documentary about Tory Island life, an interview with conductor and classical pianist Barry Douglas, any one of the daily afternoon plays on the BBC, several political debates, a host of nature programmes, a two-part biography of Martin Luther King, old episodes of The Sopranos or new episodes of Shameless.

If you wanted a little extra intellectual nourishment, then you could find it on the kind of TV shows that are held up as examples of our dumb culture. The book clubs on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Richard & Judy have become the publishing trade's most potent allies. The latter has sent David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind (among others) to the bestsellers list. These are not books with giant print and touch-and-feel pictures.

If television were indeed on some inexorable decline, perhaps we would be approaching a stage where every channel would show nothing but mud-wrestling cock-fighting or people yelling at each other on a 24-hour loop or whatever other appalling sight our dumbed-down culture drags its knuckles towards. Instead, it could be whispered that in some ways this is television's golden age. Or at least, it's as rich as it's ever been. Whatever you want from the cultural spectrum is available at pretty much any time, on several channels.

Obviously, there is inanity too. Cruelty, vulgarity, and as many scenes of families shouting at each other as you care to watch. There are programmes that have you hovering over the television with a large mallet; trends that make you so embarrassed to be human you only hope there's no passing extra-terrestrial looking in.

But the truth is that as much as there has always been good television, there has always been dumb television. There will always be a demand for it. TV will reflect the stupidities of its age, and we've always got a kick out of nastiness, conflict, an unpredictable storyline.

Several thousand years of recorded history shows that. A few decades of TV ratings back it up. The most watched television episode ever broadcast in Britain was a 1986 Christmas episode of EastEnders in which Dirty Den serves Angie Watts with divorce papers. It is a piece of drama drowning in cruelty, misery, violence and malevolence. The difference with "reality" television is that it delivers what we've always wanted from drama, only does so using real people instead of actors.

That they are in an unreal (and surreal) environment only makes it more compelling. In this case, it's not that our culture has become dumber, but that television has become more sophisticated.

At a time when people watch less television, the Celebrity Big Brother final will be watched by around eight million people. If it had aired in a prime time slot 20 years ago, it might have hoped for twice that number. That we live in a culture that is often seduced by dumbness does not make this an especially dumb culture.