57 soaps and nothing on

Primetime television is all about talent shows, soap operas and exploitative documentaries with eye-catching titles. With even the Champions League now a soap, what's left for the hard-working, middle-aged man who wants to watch something intelligent, asks DECLAN BURKE

I’VE ALWAYS wondering what Jim Royle was watching. The Royle family, of course, spent the duration of every episode slumped in front of the box in Caroline Aherne’s post-modern take on the nuclear family sitcom. Jim, the gruff, no-nonsense father, complained loud and hard about virtually every aspect of his life, bar what he was watching on the box.

Odd, that. It’s not like primetime TV is geared for the likes of Jim. He’s a middle-aged bloke, for starters.

I blame Simon Cowell myself. Maybe it's that those high-waisted trousers have cut off his testosterone supply, but Cowell, the prime mover and shaker behind the X-Factor,is single-handedly responsible for inflicting upon the viewing public a TV show that is essentially Peggy Mitchell wailing I Will Surviveover and over again.

To paraphrase Sartre, hell is other people – said people being Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Dannii Minogue and Louis Walsh. A hell that seems perfectly cosy to a great many viewers coveted by television executives, but not this middle-aged bloke.

A tad harsh?

Don’t mind me.

When it comes to primetime TV scheduling, I’m the jilted lover, a 41-year-old male for whom mainstream TV has become a hell of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The problem is, I’m old enough to remember when they played music on MTV. I’m old enough to remember when the Champions League featured actual champions, way back in the last century when the competition revelled in the modest moniker of the European Cup.

I'm a man of a certain age and moderate intelligence, or at least an intelligence moderate enough to allow me review TV on occasion for The Irish Times. I'm a viewer of wide and varied interests that include history, science, books, football, crime, politics, travel and more. Basically, I have the Reithian ambition to use TV as a medium to inform, educate and entertain indelibly printed on my soul.

So it’s with a shudder that I’m facing into the autumn primetime schedules, which will be largely dominated by Champions League football and soap operas.

It's taken a while, but the soap opera has finally shunted the average man out of the primetime TV schedules: it's possible to start with Neighboursat 1.20pm on RTÉ1 and meander through the day, channel-hopping across the terrestrial stations, on a diet consisting exclusively of soap operas, fetching up around 9pm in the evening with the second instalment of Coronation Streetover on UTV.

Interchangeable faces, identikit plots, the trivialities of kitchen sink dramas – the soap opera is the televisual equivalent of Alka-Seltzer, a comforting plop, plop, fizz; an insipid, temporary relief from tedium.

Not that football fans have any reason to feel superior. Football has itself become a soap opera, a never-ending series of banal cliffhangers populated by interchangeable, whinging poppets high on grotesque wages and an inflated sense of self worth, whose faces are as likely to turn up in the scandal section as the back pages of your favourite tabloid.

Soap operas, at least, have the virtue of brevity – thirty minutes and you’re done, and no embittered former soap stars rabbiting on during the breaks.

Meanwhile, the Champions League – glossing over that irritatingly absent apostrophe – has grown so bloated by corporate greed that a competition that begins in June with the pre-qualifying rounds doesn't actually get competitive until mid-March. In effect, 75 per cent of the Champions League is now football's equivalent of WWF wrestling, a fairytale for young boys and an excuse for their fathers to hit the pub mid-week.

SO, WHAT'S A MODERATELY intelligent man to do? The X-Factorreturns this week, of course, as a timely reminder of those halcyon days when primetime television wasn't one interminable advert for karaoke and mobile phone ringtone downloads.

Or there's always the soap operas masquerading as documentaries – My One-Legged Lesbian Former Siamese Twin Glamour Model Mum and Me, say.

Or maybe there’ll be a former soap actor cowering behind a wall in Afghanistan.

Or a fly-on-the-wall documentary about luggage handlers at Heathrow, or nauseatingly conscientious millionaires pretending to be poor for a week, and weeping for the inhumanity of it all.

As for the latest primetime crime dramas, well, it's pretty much Murder, She Wrotewith shinier surfaces, an occasional nod to ethnic minorities and some twaddle about the interweb. "It was the butler, Watson, on Facebook, with a virtual kitchen sink."

THERE ARE DECENT PROGRAMMES to be seen during the primetime hours, of course, but you'll have to gravitate towards the wilder fringes of terrestrial TV to find them. Fancy a good documentary on Caravaggio? It's BBC4 for you, squire. Some coruscating social satire? That'll be Family Guyon 3e or BBC3. A decent crime drama? Over to BBC4 again, and Kenneth Branagh's Wallanderfor a serious take on the social and psychological consequences of criminality.

And so it goes. While the mainstream channels, in the name of ever more vacuous entertainment, devote themselves to the very serious business of working out the lowest common denominator to the last decimal place, those interested in being educated and informed find themselves exiled to the margins.

It’s true, of course, that said margins are merely a button click or a playback away. It’s also true that advancing technology means that, theoretically at least, no one is at the mercy of programming schedules anymore, and that we can all record our own programmes, and entire series, at the touch of a button, in the process creating our own individualised TV station.

That quick-fix solution, however, ignores the fact that the truly important programmes on the most pervasive medium of them all are being exiled too.

The news programmes, current affairs, the cultural and social debates, all the televised conversations we used to have with one another, are now considered so irrelevant that they languish in the wild weeds of the fringes.

What’s odd about that, or so it seems to me, is that it’s the demographic of middle-aged males at the height of their earning power and with the greatest disposable income who are being marginalised in the process, and who are being asked to pay for the privilege of informing, educating and entertaining themselves, as opposed to being served such programming on a platter by a television industry that finds its very raison d’etre undermined on a daily basis by new ways of viewing.

But then, what do I know? I'm only a 41-year-old moderately intelligent male who considers Cop Rocka monumental work of genius.