Could we be witnessing the end of the Age of Ignorance? For years the culture has been dominated by witless pop music, stupid films, and so-bad-it-doesn't-need-an-adjective reality TV.
But perhaps change is afoot. A former keyboard player with a second-rate band is now a particle physicist at the universe-unravelling Large Hadron Collider; Big Brother has just recorded its lowest-ever ratings; cinema is once more engaging with serious issues, in documentary and fictional forms; and Jeremy Kyle is under fire, though sadly not literally.
So is this the end of brutish, brain-dead, dumbed-down, veneration-of-ignorance culture? More specifically, is the world now ready for intellectual reality TV?
Here are a few proposed alternatives:
Existential Farm
A bunch of notable existentialists are exhumed and brought together on a large outdoor set, disguised as a farm. The strongly held convictions of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre et al that man can impose himself on life through a conscious act of will are sorely tested when the milking machine breaks down, Brussels slashes farm subsidies and Schopenhauer leaves the chicken coop unlocked one night, with disastrous fox-related consequences.
Obscure Verse Form Smackdown
Combining the razzmatazz of professional wrestling with the delicate creativity of poetic conventions such as the haiku, villanelle and Petrarchan lyric, this is the ultimate in brutal, uncompromising, no-holds-barred versifying. Hosted by Jamie Redknapp and Lisa Tarbuck.
Who Ate All the Pi?
A group of obese mathematicians set out to discover whether pi (π) really does stretch into infinity by eating a chocolate figurine representing every number which occurs after the decimal point. Look out for the dramatic moment in episode three when the factory runs out of chocolate somewhere around the fifteen-thousandth decimal place, and producers hope the bloated boffins' sugar-addled brains won't notice that they've replaced it with carob, which doesn't taste quite as nice.
Yes, Primate Minister
Robust late-night political discussion, hosted by Mr Frisky, a chimpanzee on loan from the zoo, featuring interviews with high-level politicians and top commentators about the burning issues of the day. In the first programme, Mr Frisky screeches wildly and throws stones at Nicolas Sarkozy's head, while David Dimbleby engages in an analysis of Keynesian macroeconomics with Brutus, a potentially dangerous kimodo dragon.
I'm an All-Round Genius – Get These Other Morons Out of Here!
A heavyweight cast of hyper-intelligent polymaths, including Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky and the ghost of Susan Sontag, curry favour with an extremely demanding studio audience by listing off their diverse achievements in as entertaining a fashion as possible, while insulting their opponents in subtly amusing ways.
This is Dis-easy!
Hi-tech thrills, live in your living room, as three cocky, macho, overly competitive scientific wunderkinds inject themselves with the most rabid strain of ebola. They have just one hour in which to discover a cure by performing a series of virtual experiments on virtual monkeys while jacked into the world's most powerful computer through a cable feeding directly from the hard drive to their frontal lobe. Sponsored by Sandeman Port.
Electro-ducation
Extreme gameshow format imported from Japan in which learning-resistant school kids are strapped to steel gurneys which can be juiced up with more than ten thousand volts. They are asked a series of increasingly difficult questions, and for each one they get wrong, the voltage goes higher and higher. Eventually, so do their grades! Prizes include a moped and a snowboarding trip to the Canadian Rockies.
My Favourite Transgressive Art Works
Various celebrities are wheeled out to reminisce fondly on their favourite shocking, disgusting or highly illegal avant-garde art of the last ten years. In the first programme, Richard Attenborough outlines his appreciation of self-mutilation as part of a larger performance piece, page three girl Keeley waxes lyrical on serial killer motifs in Eastern European sculpture, and the fat fella off Lost pays homage to a Korean mime artist who drinks the blood from his own severed head as a statement about the corporatisation of the revolutionary instinct in modern democracies. Peaches Geldof asks the questions.
They're my suggestions. Now it's over to you ...
