NEVER ANSWER YOUR CRITICS is, as regular readers of this column may know, not a maxim I particularly accord with. I'm of the opinion that answering your critics is both therapeutic and entertaining. Thus it is that I draw your attention to a blog on The Guardian's website, attacking a programme I used to host, BBC 4's The Book Quiz, the final of which was held last week. In the blog - Why Does BBC 4's The Book Quiz Have None of the Right Stuff? - a chap called Alex Larmar blogs furiously against the show in general, beginning by expressing his surprise that the programme was commissioned for a second series “after the first series, hosted by David Baddiel, was deservedly panned”.

Since my sense was that my stint on the programme made very little dent in the popular consciousness, I was rather cheered to discover that it had at least garnered some reviews. Following the link provided by Mr Larmar brought me to only one review, however, on a website called TVScoop. It's undeniably a panning: after much liberal use of the classical Baddiel-haters' vocabulary (smug, clever [not in a good way], schoolboy etc), John Beresford, the TVScoop reviewer, states categorically: “...there won't be many tears shed in this house if The Book Quiz is consigned to the remainder bin”. Fair enough: but I should perhaps alert you to the clause immediately preceding this conclusion, which is: “Having myself been the butt of one of David Baddiel's cheap jokes...”

This sentence took me aback seeing as, although I like the odd deliberate obscure reference in my comedy, I'm not generally in the habit of doing jokes about people I've never heard of. However, further reading provides a clue. The show had a regular round involving filming local book groups discussing their book of the month (and then editing out any reference to its title or author, so as to force contestants to guess). Mr Beresford was a member of one of those groups; the very member, it turns out, about whom after returning to the studio following just such a filmed insert, I remarked (to quote TVscoop again) that “the bloke in the beard could be me, if I didn't have a portrait in my attic”. A cheap joke indeed, although at least a literary one.

The interesting thing about the cyberspace trail leading to this petty pass is this: Mr Beresford has every reason to be annoyed, seeing as, when signing the TV release form handed to him after his book group meeting, he wasn't expecting his perfectly respectable Baddiel the Elder look to be so childishly ridiculed. I am, however, going to have to take issue with Mr Larmar and his use of the word deservedly. Surely as a reviewer, Mr. Beresford, sitting at home still smarting from the jibe - perhaps occasionally glancing at his reflection in the mirror and thinking “beard-dye?” - is not operating on a level playing field? Would it not have been fairer to say, if you're going to link to this particular review as evidence: “chippily, resentfully, perhaps-with-a-touch-of lingering-hurt-fully, panned”?

Nonetheless, both my critics have hit on an issue with The Book Quiz. If I could once again quote John “I mean I've always thought I look rather more like Rolf Harris” Beresford: “It's either a quiz for literary aesthetes or a schoolboy comedy show: make up your mind”. Mr Beresford is quite right (although not about using the phrase literary aesthetes, which suggests that the demographic for The Book Quiz should be mainly men in black felt hats going “J.K. Huysmans? So de trop!”; nor indeed about the idea that high literature and low comedy cannot coexist - see: the whole history of culture). I stopped doing that programme because the production company came to me with a brief to deliver a funny show, a sort of literary Never Mind The Buzzcocks - They Think It's All Homer perhaps - but after we had filmed it the BBC decided that they wanted it to be a proper literary quiz, with far fewer jokes, cheap or otherwise. TV, it is true, cannot make up its mind about what to do with books (apart from in the case of those by Jane Austen, dramatising them).

It may be the case that the two media are simply incompatible. TV is frightened not of books themselves, but the discussion of books. That's what it assumes will be dull, over-serious, and deeply unvisual; that's what it's always trying to dress up in the ill-fitting costume of a quiz, or a magazine show. If TV is ever going to produce a successful book show it needs to bite the bullet and film people talking about books like they actually do, spontaeneously, argumentatively, loosely, drunkenly. I don't expect to see this show on screen any time soon. In fact by the time it is on, I imagine I'll look exactly like John Beresford.

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