Allen Lane £10 pp238

Junior Mastermind begins tomorrow on BBC1 and just look at what the 10- and 11-year-old contestants have chosen for their specialist subjects: the life and career of Howard Carter, the history of the English longbow, the Plantagenets, black holes, Egyptian deities, and the life and career of Alexander Graham Bell. Who says television and young people are more stupid than they used to be?

People have sneered at popular television ever since John Logie Baird’s mother told him to go and play outside in the fresh air instead of inventing the goggle box all day. Nobody complains if their teenager sits inside reading Dostoevsky or listening to The Magic Flute, so what exactly is our problem with television?

For me, it’s been an education. And I don’t just mean The Ascent of Man and Civilisation and Simon Schama. Sometimes education happens by accident: it’s surprising what you can pick up about American history and culture from Bonanza, Cagney and Lacey, The Simpsons or Frasier.

Steven Johnson takes this argument and goes further. He insists that we’re all getting cleverer not dumber, and that television should take the credit for this. Not just television either, but video games and the internet. According to Johnson, popular culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less. He calls this trend the Sleeper Curve after the Woody Allen film Sleeper, in which a New York health food shop-owner wakes up in the year 2173 and discovers that deep fat, cream pies and hot fudge are good for us after all. Johnson says his book is “an old-fashioned work of persuasion” and his argument is certainly very persuasive. Let’s start with video games.

“The thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard,” he says. Game designers go out of their way to make the rules obscure and difficult. Sometimes they don’t even tell you what the rules are. You find out as you go along, and unconsciously improve your problem-solving skills.

He mentions the obvious educational benefits of Sim City, a game in which players get to build a community from scratch, but claims that even simple games such as PacMan can be brain-boosting. The ravenous monsters of the PacMan maze follow predictable paths: if you navigate the game in a set pattern, you can win without being eaten. You just have to find that pattern. Makes snakes and ladders seem very tame, doesn’t it?

It’s the same with television. Johnson says that modern television also demands more from its audience than the offerings of previous decades. Not only are the plots more complex and difficult to follow, but shows such as Seinfeld and The Simpsons require intellectual footnotes: they make in-jokes that only regular viewers will understand, and also deploy constant references to other forms of popular culture. Johnson even finds intellectual merit in reality television shows such as Big Brother: by observing the relationships between the contestants, we sharpen our emotional intelligence and social skills.

The case for popular culture is closely argued: this is not a simple book. But is Johnson aiming at the right target? The people who he appears to be arguing against just can’t have been watching enough television down the years. Of course programmes have become more sophisticated: compare The Bill with the plodding pace of Dixon of Dock Green, Bob the Builder with Torchy the Battery Boy, the gardening programmes of Alan Titchmarsh with those of Percy Thrower. The technology is better, the pictures are clearer, we understand better how the medium works, and the audience has grown more demanding over the years.

The trouble is: what are we demanding? Have the success and sophistication of popular culture come at the expense of more highbrow culture? The messages here are rather mixed. Our culture, and especially television, does seem to be afraid of open displays of intelligence: just look at what Dick and Dom have done to Ask the Family. The university-educated middle class, who might once have enjoyed long dinner party conversations about Kenneth Clark and the mysteries of the Renaissance, are now more likely to be reflecting on the fate of Big Brother contestants.

Yet when we’re offered the chance to give our brains a bit of exercise, we leap on it hungrily: whether it’s queuing for Tate Modern, clamouring for Lynne Truss to tell us more about punctuation, or answering Mastermind questions on the Plantagenets.

Let’s not get too carried away with the benefits of television. A study in Seattle last year suggested that children who watch a lot of television are more likely to develop attention deficit disorder. Ironic, or what? It appears that Johnson’s thought-provoking book is written in support of a generation of children who will probably lose interest halfway through.

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