In one popular slot on national prime-time Japanese television, small struggling businesses are invited to bring the sexiest girl from their office to the studio, dress her in a bikini and immerse her in a glass bath of exceedingly hot water.

For as long as the girl is able to stand the heat, the president of the company is entitled to pitch his firm’s product or service to an audience of many millions.

This kind of show, executives at Japan’s largest television stations admit, is evidence of an industry in crisis. The networks are panicking about competition for eyeballs from the internet, video games and video-enabled mobile phones. Programme-makers are losing their way under relentless pressure from the powerful “celebrity factories” – large talent agencies whose stars dominate the prime-time hours.

Under growing commercial obligation to stuff their shows with corporate-controlled comedians and singers, the programme-makers have been forced to pursue ever more lurid and absurd ideas to stand out. Attention spans in the digital age, say Japanese television executives, have become so short that producers have to intensify massively what the audience sees. The traditional mainstays of Japanese variety television – humiliation, mild violence, sexism, mock stupidity, crazy costumes – have all been heightened to compete.

“It’s got to the point where you’ve basically got people with university degrees standing in their underpants in prime time,” said W. M. Penn, a veteran critic.

But the same producers identify the crisis as potentially a big opportunity: just as Japanese television is taking a dip towards the lowbrow, the international appeal of its innovative programme concepts is soaring.

For despite Japanese television’s long-mocked reputation for wackiness, cruelty and mayhem, the current crisis does not arise from any lack of ideas.

Japan’s main commercial stations, Fuji, Asahi, TBS and Nippon TV, remain enormously rich generators of new concepts: many silly, many exploitative but almost always compelling.

The titles of programme segments give a clue as to the lunacy on offer. “Which of these beautiful people still looks good when they sneeze?”; “Could Ben Johnson beat his 1988 Olympic record if he were assisted by a dozen giant fans?”

Under the new “celebrity or die” policy, evening schedules in a typical week include shows in which Blist actors appear disguised as national stereotypes – a Mexican, a Russian etc – and are ordered to eat macadamia nuts with chopsticks from a fast-moving conveyor belt.

In Hoi Hoi Girl, a male celebrity is lured into a restaurant and left alone while a provocatively dressed woman sits across the room adjusting her clothes. Every time he steals a glance at her, he is “fined” money from a nominal account that he must settle later.

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