In praise of rubbish television

Of course, the real problem is that there isn't enough rubbish on television. I mean real rubbish. Rubbish you can get your teeth into. Rubbish that leaves you with a smile on your face. Rubbish of the old-fashioned kind.

You may say that television has never been worse, and that there are more bad programmes on television than ever before. Indeed, I have made my own humble contribution to the genre. But it is not the type of bad television that is under discussion here.

You can watch all the reality shows that God sends you. But everybody knows that one ice-skating cricketer, or fake-tanned ballad singer, cannot hold a candle to The Brothers (a very old British television series with shaky sets) or The Riordans (a very old Irish television series with shaky sets.) These were what used to be called fun.

Sunday nights was all I had left, with Lark Rise to Candleford immediately followed by Kingdom in a shameless glut of escapism, and now Kingdom is over. Lark Rise to Candleford is a BBC costume drama set among the plain people of Oxfordshire - plain, but ever so grateful to the handsome squire. This is interesting because the books were a pretty passionately argued indictment of the social inequalities that pertained at that time.

My only clear memory of the books is of the moment when Laura's family was walking around the city of Oxford, looking at the beautiful universities, and her beloved little brother announced that he would go to one of those universities when he grew up. My, how the adults of the party laughed. What I remember of the television programme is a series of stunning blouses that look very difficult to iron - that is television rubbish in a nutshell.

You would think that Lark Rise to Candleford would provide enough hardcore escapism for one evening, but actually Kingdom, which is set in contemporary Norfolk, makes Lark Rise to Candleford look like Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Kingdom is the All Creatures Great and Small for the 21st century. And who did not love All Creatures Great and Small, possibly the greatest television rubbish ever broadcast?

Kingdom has hit on the brilliantly simple idea of building its story around a good man. Peter Kingdom is a good man. Everyone around him says so: "You're a good man, Peter." He drives a big car. He has principles, and instills principles in his junior colleagues. The extraordinary part of it, the giant leap of faith required of the audience for Kingdom, is that Peter Kingdom is a solicitor. A solicitor in an unspoiled, socially functioning English town. Part of the appeal of Kingdom is that it shows you all sorts of things you have never actually seen : flooded fenland, solicitors of integrity and owls.

Boston Legal, which is also unsurpassable rubbish, is like that too, even though it is set in America. Its lawyers employ people with a history of mental illness and struggle to do the right thing every single week. In the land of television rubbish, the good lawyer has assumed the role of the unicorn in the fairytale. The idea seems to be that if the viewer will accept the idea of a principled lawyer it will swallow anything else that you want to throw at it.

Just as in Midsomer Murders, where people ride ticking bicycles past vast blooms of wisteria in order to murder their sisters-in-law. If you can believe in Midsomer, a place where the murder rate is so astronomically high that there is a statistical threat of depopulation - and I do believe in it, absolutely - then there is no outrageous plot twist from which you will recoil. This vein of television fantasy is inexhaustible.

Within the past fortnight the actress Julia McKenzie has been appointed to play the eternal Miss Marple, a television detective who must be approaching the age of 150.

It's all the past, isn't it? And it's all somebody else's past as well. Have we no unspoiled Victorian interiors that we could throw a couple of anti-macassars over and call it a historical drama? Have we no country lanes that we could send a couple of prewar lovers wandering down? Have we no tales of middle-class struggle of our own that we could drool over?

This country has far too much history and far too little past. Our television is obsessed with major events and has no time for the minutiae of daily life out of which real drama is made; it has only just started broadcasting intelligent programmes on the Civil War, for goodness sake. Yet back in the bad old days, when documentaries about the Civil War could not be made, RTÉ managed to produce something as good as Strumpet City. I don't think that there has been a historical drama set in 20th-century Ireland since.

Surely something must have happened here during the Emergency, electrification and the fight against tuberculosis that could be transformed into a decent television series?

This is a strange thing to say in the wake of the spectacle presented by last week's Irish Film and Television Awards, but television can get too posh. It is meant to entertain us and to bring us pleasure. That, after all, is what we are paying for.