Hearing, on A New Life: Risking It All (Channel 4), that Richard and Craig’s ambition was “to revolutionise hairdressing in the suburbs of Sheffield”, your hunch was that here was another pair of reality-show dreamers who might pursue their goal, but would never overtake it.

Richard, a hairdresser, owed £30,000 on credit cards. Craig, a carpetfitter, sold the family home and sank the £35,000 profit into leasing and fitting out a salon in a brisk suburb. The pair had no business plan; were as familiar with computers as they were with the work of Wittgenstein; and had no clue how much they needed to take each week to break even.

With just days to go before they opened the doors of their salon, and with dozens of appointments booked, they didn’t even have any staff. As long as their new clients were all bald, and just wanted their scalps washed and dried, then the new salon would be able to cope.

Even with guidance from the entrepreneur Martin Webb, who does for would-be tycoons in A New Life what Property Ladder’s Sarah Beeny does for novice property developers, you suspected that Richard and Craig would flounder hopelessly (and entertainingly), reminding us that plucky enthusiasm, hard work and a desire to be your own boss aren’t enough to make it in business.

Sure enough, there were familiar hiccups. The boiler didn’t work. The salon’s mirrors didn’t arrive. The manicurist quit. Someone stole the salon’s appointments book. But, each time, Richard and Craig pulled through. They worked hard, they were inventive in promoting their salon, they launched a website and online shop. The pair got lucky. And when they weren’t being lucky, they went out and made their own luck. In less than a year, turnover was teetering higher than Marge Simpson’s beehive. Richard and Craig were en route to becoming millionaires.

And here’s the weird part: Richard and Craig’s success was heartwarming to watch.

Television has somehow got itself into a rut of thinking that carping is king; that watching people fail is the sweetest entertainment; that humiliating members of the public — whether they are singers on The X Factor whose voices sound the way David Gest looks, or guinea-pigs on 10 Years Younger who look the way Mike Tyson sounds, or husbands and wives held up to ridicule on Wife Swap, or inarticulate would-be entrepreneurs who are needlessly humiliated by the self-assured moguls on Dragons’ Den — alone makes for riveting television. It’s the entertainment of the Colosseum, and our thumbs have grown used to pointing downwards.

But, look, that’s still a long way from cheering Selina Scott’s rant on Don’t Get Me Started (Five). Her theme? Why I Hate Television Today. There’s evidently no pleasing Scott when she switches on the box in her Yorkshire farmhouse. Big Brother (“a manipulating, nasty piece of work”), Britain’s Worst Wife (“I wonder what Emily Pankhurst would make of it”), 10 Years Younger: Bikini Special (“cruelty TV . . . a gruesome programme”), they all make her shiver.

Soaps reek with “underdressed characters and oversexed storylines”. Ageing male presenters, bar David Attenborough, wave their hands about too much. News programmes? They’ve become “so formulaic and weak”, says Scott, although she adds that, “back when I launched breakfast TV in the UK, I know I was there not only as Frank Bough’s co-presenter, but also to be seen in the role of the second, or trophy, wife. How depressing that that formula, with a few tweaks, is still the same today.”

Hang on, is Scott complaining that television has got far worse, or that it has failed to rise from the depths to which it sank when she still regularly appeared on it?

The trouble is that all this just makes Scott and her similarly disaffected interviewees sound as if they’re taking part in an episode of Grumpy Old Television Watchers. To cite a few grim examples and to then tar all TV is like wincing at junk food, and at the fact that you can now buy cheese in a spray can, and concluding that there is just nothing worth eating any more.

It’s not that it’s lazy; it’s silly. People who wax about a lost golden age of television would struggle to swallow a diet of 1970s programming for even a week. It would look slow, dull, clunky: life, fashions, humour, they’ve all moved on. You can’t step into the same river twice. Bad television is just too easy a target. Bad American TV is an even easier target, and just look how good the best of American television has been in recent years.

Here’s the oddest part of Scott’s rant. It’s delivered on the box. Isn’t that a paradox? “I’m saying British TV is not worth watching, and I’m saying it on British TV.”

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