Frances Grant: The disturbing world of TV

This is not a story for those who like their television free of intelligent life and offering only opportunities for the wannabe famous. If your idea of a nice night in is to malinger on the couch watching rooms being renovated, ugly ducklings being carved into swans or minor celebrities cavorting in Fiji, you will find this most unpleasant.

If you are interested in makeover and reality game shows in which the contestants bitch, backstab and are interested only in furthering their own ends, you'd be better off reading something else because, for you, there will be no happy ending.

In this Powerpoint, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and nothing to relieve the atmosphere of misery and despair.

The cold and gloomy year of 2004 has drawn to a close and it is time to reflect on some deeply disturbing signs that have emerged in television. Peruse the next few pages as we round up the year on the box and read of some unfortunate events and frightening new trends.

If you're the sort of viewer who can't wait for the next, no-commitment-required CSI or Law & Order franchise to open on a screen near you, you're probably feeling rather complacent. If you are part of the MTV generation, with attention span long enough only for music videos of bad-ass boys with bling and babes in bikinis — put this down now and go back to staring mesmerised at C4.

For emerging from the darkest recess of the schedules, hanging around on the margins or on nights when they think no one is watching, something called quality local programming has been lurking, ready to catch you unawares.

The wretched document that started the trouble was devised by those crones and their lackeys in Wellington and is known as the charter. It may be only a coincidence and perhaps too soon for this evil spell to have worked its full effect, but some challenging telly has broken out on these shores.

I shudder to report the imaginative brain function required to follow the intriguing doings of the characters in drama Insider's Guide to Happiness. It's hideous to report, but that irreverent animated comedy Bro' Town actually made people laugh — a lot.

Late on Saturday night television celebrated such unworthy, overly clothed people as historians, artists and poets by — gasp — devoting a whole hour or more to just one person's story. A blot on the landscape called Peter Elliott went on intrepid journeys through the land and actually gave us a history lesson.

Celebrities and game show contestants such as Lana Coc-kroft are charming and resourceful people with the kind of pleasant facial features that should guarantee a smooth ride, but this year they have been extremely unlucky.

Poor Lana's stay in Fiji was rife with misfortune and despair. The cache of physically attractive men and women who went to set up a hot holiday spot in the Pacific, saw The Resort just kind of fizzle.

The winds of ill fortune blow from across the Tasman, where the taste for reno-reality and cosmetic surgery shows is fading. Our Aussie friends, according to year-end ratings reports, showed remarkable appetite for documentaries about ancient civilisations, natural and industrial history in Wild Australasia and The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World and other cultures in Michael Palin's Himalaya. Here, too, the intelligent and genial Palin, and other pointy heads such as Alain de Botton and Professor Robert Winston, struck a chord.

Perhaps a dreadful future is looming, when telly will leave off redesigning our noses, bums, gardens and living rooms and think about fitting out our brains instead.