Time was when you knew where you were with listings magazines. There were only two - the Radio Times for the erudite few and the TV Times for the plebs. Not such an extreme view when you saw the letters pages of both publications back to back. Radio Times would feature a nice small serious-typeface of a letter from a man complaining that the recent Bartok anniversary wasn't sufficiently covered on Radio 3. TV Times would have a woman complaining that a character on The Bill had dropped a crisp packet on the ground and that this was setting a bad example to her children. Both magazines knew their readership and catered for them accordingly (ironic seeing as – with RT only covering BBC listings and TV Times covering everything else - one would need to buy both magazines for the full picture anyway).

Then of course it all changed, the rules were amended meaning that any half-arsed publisher could bring out a listings magazine. And they fucking did too. Dozens of them appeared at once - TV Quick, What’s On TV, This Week’s TV, It’s TV, TV Now, Have A Look At Our Big Listings, This Guide, That Guide...each boasting the particular individual trait of being exactly the same as the others. Few survived.

TV Times didn’t have to do much of a revamp to keep in line with the competition, obviously. Radio Times however had to think fast. The new magazines were acquiring a sizeable chunk of their readership (they were often much cheaper to buy, more colourful and didn’t have any long words in them). The readers who remained loyal were those who craved for something more than half-arsed recipes and twatting full paged pictures of the latest Casualty heart throb every week. So they set to work on a revamp which they hoped would continue to cater for the highbrow while not alienating the plebs. In doing so, they acquired a new breed of followers: middle-class plebs.

At the helm of the new RT was Nicholas Brett who decided that what the magazine needed above all else was his fucking views in a little editorial. These were accompanied by a photos of his irritating grinning mug, essentially giving a face to the magazine. Up until this point RT had a nice impenetrable air about it. Non-populist and unassuming - they wouldn’t attempt to tell you what to watch, rather they’d give you no-nonsense information about the broadcasts and lovely long capsule descriptions brimming with production info. From this, the reader was allowed to make up their own mind.

Having to jump suddenly from covering two channels to four, then later five (not to mention a bunch of satellite listings and of course the radio listings that gives the magazine its title) took a predictable toil on this quality control. The capsules shrank into oblivion until only the barest info remained. The pictures shrank also and simply fitted into an identical template which was reused week after week. Add to this the fact that, in order to keep in some sort of competition with the cheaper listings mags, they had to move the publication date forward (by about five days), and the likelihood of getting any of the listings 100% correct was unlikely.

The introduction of ‘Choice’ articles further fuelled the fire. Instead of listings which gave equal weight to all programmes, we now had a big waste of half a page (at the start of each day’s viewing) which basically told you what you should be watching - chummy little dissections of the more popular shows, programmes which RT had decided most plebs will be watching anyway,

So it continued, so it got worse and worse. Nicholas Brett left to be replaced by a woman called Sue Robinson who achieved the impossible by actually taking the magazine even further down market.

Editor Of The Year

Another recent revamp of the magazine - a decision which allowed the editor to gush away in her leader with twee references to Changing Rooms - substantially decreased the typeface of the listings themselves. Sadly the 'Choice' articles increased in size.

There's a curious thing about RT - they seem almost frightened of missing out on public fads. So much so that they now cheerfully fanfare everything that looks like it might be popular just in case they seem out of touch. This observation can be proved by the fact that they practically ignored The Fast Show's growing popularity for the first two series, then belatedly printed an hysterically incorrect 'idiot's guide' to the catchphrases when series three emerged (by which time it was arguably a spent force anyway). Since then they've attempted to latch on to everything, devoting fawning front covers and overlong leaders to things that, given a minimal short-sighted reference point, look like they might grip the nation. And when Ghormenghast turns out to be shit, they don’t have to answer for it – in fact they blame us (‘A bit of a slow-starter, according to our poll’/’Given a unanimous thumbs-down by you, the viewer)’. When all the hype they created has finally died down, only then do they actually swallow their pride and say it was rubbish, their initial lapdog hyperbole lost in the mists of morgue-files).

Their true colours shine when anything vaguely experimental becomes popular and they feel they need to attempt to explain the joke to its readership, refusing to credit them with the intelligence it takes to understand The Royle Family ('Don't worry that there isn't a plot - that's the point!!!') or The League Of Gentlemen ('Surreal!'). Often they've nothing to go on except rumours. This is when their oft-heard sulky battle-cry of 'No preview-tapes were available…' is screamed aloud, along with a few theories of what the show might be like. It's nice to imagine that certain production companies might withhold such tapes on purpose just to read what a pig's ear summarisation RT comes up with.

Read between the lines. So keen to publicise stuff that is likely to be a success, not having the sheer bloody words to write about anything else. Lee and Herring's Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy were utterly ignored…until recently when someone wrote them a letter which pointed out that the latter had 'some great catchphrases'. Not only was the letter printed but the capsule description for TMWRNJ doubled in length that week! Imagine their office response – ‘Oh…it has catchphrases? Like The Fast Show? That means it might become popular…’.

And Christ, that letters page… What was once quite a decent, thought-provoking arena for televisual debate is now a wankers-forum for the worst excesses of human laziness and formulaic fodder. No doubt they assume they're clever by printing two vastly opposing letters on the same subject back to back, highlighting differing opinions. A better editor would work out that two differing letters simply cancel each other out and the subject ceases to be a talking matter. Nothing is resolved and the staff have to do no work whatsoever

All TV forums attract those who enjoy pointing out bad continuity and implausible dramatisations. Unfortunately the all-encompassing derogatory ‘trainspotter’ tag is a nice convenient way of not separating those with a genuine interest in television and the gushing would-be-clever prattle-about-nothing from idiots attempting to pleb their way into print (‘Look, Matt, they’ve printed my hilarious letter about David Jason’s moustache’). RT not only prints a million letters a week from the latter group, they actively encourage them with the twat-bletherings of Alison Graham, a gushing middle aged middle class woman who genuinely thinks she's witty and clever without realising that her attempts at comedic writing would make the cast of BBC2’s Bruiser blush with embarrassment.

Alison ‘Dr Crippen’ Graham

Alison Graham is the columnist equivalent of those infuriating people who think up (or more often steal) one solitary half-amusing observation, then repeat it ad nauseam in pub gatherings - each time acting like it’s an off-the-cuff remark. The sort of person who spends more time cultivating an air of being witty than actually taking the time to ponder on what they’re actually saying.

For every lame joke she makes about how ‘the eclipse was cloudy everywhere except on Eastenders’, there are a hundred gushing wastes of skin all over the country fuelled into writing something of a similar weak vein for the letters page. They've even set aside an 'And Finally…' spot for such attempts at humour. In a better world this would be a good thing - to keep the twats away from the main meat of public debate - but the rest of the letters page really isn't filled with anything any better. They still include the odd stray letter from a disgruntled Bartok aficionado but these are buried waist-deep in a sea of worthlessness – non-debates based on non-opinions, all written in a curiously similar, fey, gushing style, all setting sail on a sea of exclamation marks. This of course is enough to discourage anybody with a half-decent observation or complaint from writing. Where's the fun in debating with plebs?

Another factor that would stop your viewpoint getting across is the insidious little habit they have of choosing to give top billing to letters which aren't even on the subject of television but instead allude to something much closer to the editor's heart…

Just as Matthew Wright's column in The Mirror is a disturbing one-man crusade to make himself seem important despite having no news, contacts or journalistic talent (‘My mate Madonna wins an award - look, I’m standing next to her…’), or The Sun newspaper attempts to turn every positive news event into a story concerning The Sun (‘Man saves cat from drowning - he once bought a copy of THE SUN!!’), the Radio Times now has a basic biological need to fill its letters page with comments about the Radio Times.

At the moment they're playing this curious little game which appears to involve allowing Polly Toynbee to vaguely insult some little pocket of the community or other in the course of writing about womb inflammation or something. Then, a representative of that pocket of the community joins in the game by writing a letter complaining that Polly Toynbee shouldn't have said what she said when she said it. The letter gets printed. And…that's it. Nothing is resolved. No carpeting for Toynbee, no apologies for the complainant. And the following week the game starts again. They even started to rename her page ‘In My View’, almost indignantly inviting people to complain about Ms Toynbee's dangerous views on life. RT love their little enfant terrible (and need to highlight her 'terrible'ness by printing every single letter alluding to her). Of course if anybody ever dared to stand up and say 'Polly Toynbee couldn't be less offensive if she turned into a puppy' then maybe the game would acquire some sort of winner.

Polly Toybee (© ‘Lazy Journalist Scum’ – Lee & Herring)

Not that complaining ever affects their working practices. You can't change the views of a gushing middle-aged middle-class woman. They've too much to lose, too much of a neurotic, fragile (yet worryingly expanded) ego. Once attaining some sort of hierarchy within the office politic of any given occupation, no amount of persuasion, complaining or outright threatening can alter any decision that they make. They don’t see it as constructive criticism over which a matter can be debated rationally - more a screaming indictment of their entire career path which must be swept aside using any excuse possible.

To illustrate - a complaint, which somehow managed to get past the letters editor, once pointed out that the way in which they always insisted on printing the age of any letter-writer under the age of 18 was patronising in the extreme. A good point, which garnered no reply from the editor. And it seemed to hold for a few weeks - we were suddenly spared the gushing cuteness of unnaturally erudite missives from ‘John - Aged 9’ or ‘Amy and Caroline - Aged 7 & 8’. Then, lo and behold, another letter found its way into print which complained about the original complaint. No prizes for assuming that the latter epistle was written 'in-house' by the editor who just couldn't stand having her gushing decisions questioned. And, the following week, yet more useless letters from precocious (and clearly highlighted) eight-year-olds. A similar letter complained about the afore-mentioned 'Choice' articles and was similarly dissed into oblivion in the same manner.

Fabricating letters presumably forfeits some sort of trades descriptions act but who would complain about the Radio Times? The general attitude is that they’re harmless and twee. Okay, so they filch the views of overlong letters, compose new ones and give them fake names for the sake of convenience? Par for the course.

The letters page had always, until the recent revamp, been placed at the end of the magazine. Now it’s practically at the beginning, glaring at you, even before you’ve had a chance to get incredulous about Polly Toynbee’s lack of personal insight, John Peel’s waste or time or Mark Lawson’s disinterested tape reviews. Presumably the page was shifted to a more prominent fixture to convey the message that the readers’ views on TV are very important indeed. In fact, it could be seen as just the latest stage in their plan to breed the perfect TV-watcher, devoid of any genuine interests, just tagging along with whatever’s popular.

A recent article instigated a vote on 'the best telly moments of all time' (designed to pre-empt a C4 show due to be broadcast a few weeks later). Again, this is a debate which can have no clear outcome as they insisted on giving the readers examples of the sort of things they might wish to vote for. Any half-competent armchair-sociologist could work out that the only effective way of constructing such a debate would be to give no examples whatsoever. This would force the readership to use their own imagination and rely on personal rather than forced memories. Of course the outcome would be a list of TV moments so disparate and eclectic that no readable conclusion could be reached and would show what a mockery such an vote is. But RT don't want a ‘debate’ - just a game to which everyone knows the rules.

They've also echoed the compulsory plebbing-down as practised by the 'Everyone's Talking About It' trailers for EastEnders. The trailers in question are carefully designed to make the viewing idiot feel alienated (subtext: everyone else is talking about it - why aren't you?) and also to make it the norm to refuse to differentiate between real life and soap fantasy (a TV Quick philosophy). RT have their own set of badly researched factfiles bearing the headline 'Everyone's Talking About…', not to mention the equally sinister 'What Do You Mean You've Never Seen..?' (subtext - 'consider yourself ostracised if you're not part of our little gang').

The general Puritanism about sexuality that sweeps through the magazine can sometimes be hilarious. The constant warnings on the review pages that a film might contain ‘nudity, sex scenes, swearing and drug abuse' are so carefully worded to warn those poor pockets of the readership that need to be protected from real life but are also a handy reference guide for cheap masturbational fodder. No one has yet attempted to explain how one can have a 'sex scene' without 'nudity' of course. Even funnier were their ‘Choice’ articles about the second batch of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads which reached new levels of gushing, reaching an orgasmic peak of absolute creaming equanimity…until they discovered that one of the plays detailed the activities and thoughts of a child molester. Then, the gushing stopped and we saw, in all its transparent horror, RT attempting to justify their ‘Choice’.

As RT approached their big double issue to celebrate the Millennium they asked the readers for 'New Years Resolutions' for TV executives (and the editor started the ball rolling by suggesting 'The Royle Family' 52 weeks a year' (subtext: ‘I still understand it’) and 'an end to canned laughter' (subtext: ‘I know absolutely nothing about the workings of television’). The letters which graced the issue beggared belief and almost read like a best-of for the worst recesses of gushing plebeian brain-stalling and tabloid piss.

We got the perennial idiot-squeal of 'Why don't we inject some humour into Eastenders?', the pointless newspaper-campaign echoes of 'Bring back 'News At Ten'; the cliched bore-mongering 'Let’s have more of those excellent wildlife programmes with David Attenborough' and the ludicrously eclectic 'More John Peel and Clarissa Dickson Wright but less Charlie Dimmock, Gail Porter and Antoine de Caunes', plus the usual psychotic turmoil of referring to soap-characters as if they're real people and some maniac complaining about the bongo drums at the start of the BBC News and the time pips on Radio 4 in the same breath. These were prize-winning letters. Written by prize cunts.

So that’s the Good Old Radio Times. And you thought it was an inoffensive little listings mag with a penchant for sticking French & Saunders on the cover. Look again.