Tony Earnshaw: Ken Loach's plea for a return to intelligent TV programming

The 74-year-old strident Left-winger unleashed his entire arsenal last week when he launched a stinging attack on the state of TV in 21st-century Britain.

Denouncing television as "a grotesque reality game" in a keynote speech at the London Film Festival he went on to hang, draw and quarter the medium that gave him his start but which has, he believes, been taken over by time-serving executives.

He applauded news that several high-ranking heads had rolled at the BBC and said forking out 1m on golden handshakes to be free of them was a price worth paying. "Good riddance," he said.

So what's his beef? This, after all, is a man who smashed down

the doors of televisual drama in 1966 with Cathy Come Home, a stark play about a mother's struggles that led directly to the setting up of the homeless charity, Shelter.

And therein lies the rub and the core of Loach's ire. He can look back to a time when our TV screens were not swamped with programming targeted towards the lowest common denominator. Instead of series featuring celebrity cooks, vacuous pop or dance competitions and countless reality shows, television was once about intelligent programming.

"Television began with such high hopes," he observed. "It was going to be the National Theatre of the air(waves]. It was going to be a place where society could have a national discourse and they've reduced it to a grotesque reality game".

I find it hard to fault Loach's eloquent rant, even if it comes from a strictly retrospective point of view. It's hard enough to navigate a route through the dross that infests our TV screens. Certainly there's little fun in it. So one gravitates towards the channels that specialise in the material one wants. For me it's the likes of Sky Arts, BBC 4 and Turner Classic Movies.

Okay, so my TV has an off switch. And I don't have to watch the multitudinous channels that are available to me. But when it comes to seeking out what I (and perhaps Mr Loach) consider to be quality programming, I resemble a lonely man in a desert, dying of thirst, struggling onward in search of that far-off oasis. Too often it's just a mirage.

All politics aside, Loach's plea is for a return to some of the values that long ago gave us great television. He was once a part of that world but he, like so many of his contemporaries, are now considered living fossils – links with a far-off past that has been consigned to history and repeats on UK Gold.

He's right to complain. And on this subject he speaks for me. I'm not asking for Turgenev, Brecht or Strindberg, just a break from a never-ending menu of drivel.

There has to be some jam in the sandwich; all we are being fed is stale, mouldy bread. And it sticks in my throat.