A boot stamping on a face over and over: boot, face, face, boot — George Orwell’s vision of the domestic screen of the future as seen from 1948. Three minutes’ hate. This was before television was a mass medium. He was thinking more of Pathé newsreel, but still it seems prophetic. Though not directed by a centralised dictatorship, as it turns out government doesn’t need to manipulate the communal vitriol. We can manage that on our own. And they don’t have to invent hate figures. Television does it with a deft ease. Simply to appear on the box is to be instantly loathed by vast numbers of viewers.

I’ve been thinking about boot-in-face television a lot recently. I wasn’t going to write about the Brand/Ross thing because any more comment seems wearying and otiose, and also because it all happened on the wireless. But, last week, I had dozens of news bods calling me up demanding a quote or that I go on a panel to discuss the future of the BBC, broadcasting, liberalism, respect, humour, sex, reruns, haircuts. All of which I declined, because I just think all of it is absurd and what I do know is that none of it was about what it was about. It was all really in the timing — comedy is all about timing.

If this had happened six months ago, nobody would have picked up a phone or a pen. But then everything changed, and now the future looks bad and we’re all frightened and angry and there’s nobody who seems guilty. All those faceless bastards who got us into this are playing the victim, and we need someone to take the blame, to take the fall, to eat dirt and walk the plank.So, why not that one that gets too much sex and the other one that gets too much money? It’s this very British thing — well, actually, it’s a very English thing — self-indulgent ire. Two complaints from people who heard the broadcast; 30,000 from folk who didn’t. The English just love to be given permission to indulge their anger.

The past two weeks have had the carnival excitement of a festive stoning that ended with every politician who could get to a microphone lobbing half a brick. We need a word for the joy of blame. Might I posit Tonbridge: Tonbridge, the pleasure of justified fury. You’re having a real Tonbridge at the moment. There is a national sense of Tonbridge. A couple of things came out of the week’s Tonbridging. One was the unpleasant sight of radio and television personalities scrabbling to become part of the mob and sling dung at their erstwhile colleagues. I particularly remember Parkinson sucking his teeth, more in avuncular sorrow than anger, while sitting coyly in front of a pile of his latest book. Pity to waste the opportunity: only a couple of weeks before, he’d been happily plugging it on Jonathan Ross’s show.

We should be careful what we Tonbridge over. If Ross doesn’t come back, who do you think you’re going to get instead? I’ll tell you who: Simon Cowell’s mini-me, Piers Morgan, a man I can’t abide. In my book, he’s the most amateurishly unpleasant, small-minded, bottom-sniffing, drip-dry tosspot to grace your living room. And if that thought doesn’t send you to the e-mail begging the BBC to bring Ross back, then he probably owes you one.

Ross and Brand are two of the most talented, original and consistently funny performers on television. They are part of what makes our home-grown broadcasting an interesting and entertaining thing, and I can only wish them both well and that they come back soon, unchastened. It really wasn’t about you, lads. It was about the rest of us. And if you think I’m only writing this because I’m part of the cosy, metropolitan, liberal, intellectual elite, well, of course I am. What else would I be? Who else do you think works in the media? What do you want? Your papers and TV made by provincial, draconian, philistine nonentities? Well, then: grow up and get a grip.

Sharpe is back. Never has a name seemed such a sad mockery. Dull, blunt, soft, tired and dumb. And such a shame. What kidult didn’t love Sharpe and doesn’t think Sean Bean was one of the best small-screen action heroes? Let’s share a moment’s reverie. The music, for a start, the old English folk songs played on a penny whistle. The great casting. Remember Pete Postlethwaite, remember Elizabeth Hurley, remember Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts and the slogging up the peninsula? Sharpe was that rare thing, really good expensive drama for boys. Every other book adaptation is made for girls who want to wash Mr Darcy’s smalls. Once in a decade, blokes get Sharpe or Hornblower.

But Sharpe’s Peril had the look of hole-in-the-wall television. You stick your cardboard character in the slot, tap in your lines and out comes a whole lot of cash. Bean left, all those years ago, young and vital, aggressive and dangerous, an actor who filled the screen with raw sexual power. Now he’s back, with thinning hair, stiff legs, a fleshy belly, a puffy face. The power has become petulance, the sex an ogling prurience; and he exudes all the coiled danger and energy of a bus conductor on the school run. It was a dire travesty of the Sharpe we once loved. The fighting was pants, the love interest wasn’t interesting. And although the production values were long on extras (it was India, after all), it was entirely bereft of imagination, pace or suspense. It looked as if it had been filmed and edited as a school project. Slow and lazy and boring. Zounds, how do you make Sharpe boring?

HarperCollins, the publishers, were credited as co-producers. Perhaps the point was to make people turn off and pick up a book.

The Prince Charles Generation is not the most eyeball-grabbing, must-see title of the week, conjuring up as it does strangulated men fiddling with their cuffs, saying “Have you been waiting long?” to daffodils. Actually, it turned out to be winsomely touching. The conceit was to look at the lives of men born on the same day as the Prince of Wales. They ranged from Michael Dobbs, Mrs Thatcher’s putto, to a loner who had spent two decades on the dole. Between them, there were millionaires and bankrupts. Stories of death and triumph, of things built and knocked down. Of life. And although they were all rather too politely selective, still they were watchable, marking the progress from birth to retirement of a generation. It was all gently done.

The great hole in the middle of the doughnut was, of course, Charles Windsor. We saw his birth being announced on the BBC as “Her Majesty was safely delivered of a prince”. And we thought it was a binary option: a boy or a girl. Charles continued to be unlike the rest of us. A strange pampered human who has yet to be taken out of the box and used for anything. While all the other men had lived interesting, fulfilling lives that were more challenging than his, he is a pitiably sorry mannequin, abused by a stony heredity and chilly privilege.

This was an example of one of those things TV does best. It makes ordinary lives memorable, gives the commonplace and the unexamined space and dignity without patronage. Television is the only cultural medium that welcomes the common or garden without snobbery. And that was exactly what was all wrong about My Family at War. As it billed itself, this was some of the best-loved television personalities taken back to the first world war — Matthew Kelly, Eamonn Holmes, Kirsty Wark and Kate Silverton, to name just a few of the most adored. They were asked to retrace the footsteps of an ancestor back to the great war. Everything about this was embarrassing, demeaning and irreverent. First, the automatic assumption that the way into every subject, however mordant or grave, is through celebrity, and that any celebrity who will do it will do. And worse, that the only way an audience can understand a subject is if you personalise it and make it contemporary. But surely the very heart of the pathos of the great war was that it was more about ordinary men, citizen soldiers unclouded by rank, privilege or celebrity? It was a people’s war, and out of the monumental sacrifice it brought forth the century of socialism, universal suffrage, human rights and meritocracy.

Dumping Rolf Harris and his hideous, infantile Two Little Boys pop song (now fortuitously rereleased as a Christmas single) onto the trenches in the week before Remembrance Sunday is an act of such towering, vile bad taste, a huge skidding lapse of judgment, that you wonder why there haven’t been thousands of calls to complain, to demand he never appear on TV again and that someone’s head must roll

Sharpe’s Peril (ITV1, Sunday); The Prince Charles Generation (Channel 4, Thursday); My Family at War (BBC1, Monday-Wednesday)

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