Coarse TV damages all who watch it

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is probably right when he says that the greed, superficiality, treachery and adultery depicted in ITV's Footballers' Wives is a depressingly accurate parable of modern Britain.

But it is only part of a far wider malaise afflicting British broadcasting - and far from the most serious offender.

The more I watch British TV, especially after the 9pm watershed, the more I am struck by how what is meant to entertain, educate and inform is, in fact, a major contributor to the coarsening of our society.

The sort of programming once confined to the wee small hours of the satellite channels - I'm thinking of shows that specialise in yobbish and foul-mouthed behaviour like Ibiza Uncovered and its numerous spin-offs - are now infecting the core schedules of the mainstream terrestrial networks.

The f-word is now ubiquitous in so much British television drama and comedy (even the c-word is creeping in) to an extent unimaginable even a few years ago. Channel 4's No Angels is a prime example. Last week's episode involved a foulmouthed yob who was allowed full vent to his limited and almost wholly obscene vocabulary.

I appreciate that this is a gritty drama series designed to depict nurses in perhaps more accurate circumstances than is usual on TV and to that extent has a serious purpose. But the dramatic arts in British broadcasting are now overdependent on bad language, crudity and explicit sex.

It is not just in drama or solely confined to post-watershed programmes. ITV's Saturday morning children's show, Ministry of Mayhem, boasts a farting competition. Even something as clever and sophisticated as BBC2's Coupling cannot avoid the f-word - as if to leave it out would somehow diminish its streetwise credentials, even though its use doesn't make the show any funnier.

I understand it is the job of broadcasters sometimes to depict society as it is rather than as it should be and that contemporary TV is to some extent a window on the yobbery, violence and crudity that has become a prevalent part of modern Britain.

But British TV, including the commercial sector, is supposed to be suffused with public-service values and obligations. It has a duty to raise our standards and horizons, not simply wallow in our worst characteristics and basest behaviour.

Standards are higher on American networks, even though TV there is driven entirely by the commercial imperative. The US networks adhere to far tougher standards when it comes to bad language or explicit sex and violence.

True, well-made shows like Sex and the City and the Sopranos have their fair share of all three. But in America they are shown on HBO, a pay-TV channel to which parents can control access. In Britain, they are broadcast on network TV, available to all at the press of a zapper, and do not seem out of place because of similar homegrown fare on the network schedules.

Perhaps America goes too far in the other direction: it recently went into a frenzy because Janet Jackson bared a breast on prime time. That is absurd. Nor do I call for Mary Whitehouse-style censorship. That would be illiberal, unworkable and carry the danger of repression.