Philip Hensher: Now we've all signed up to the freak show

This'll do for an amusing final item on the ITV news, they must have thought. A painting of a fat lady with no clothes on had sold for $33m, and, guess what, here's the fat lady herself to be interviewed. "Fat Sue, as she's affectionately known," gushed Katie Derham before cutting to that splendid woman, Sue Tilley. "In the words of Roy Castle, Sue, you're a record breaker!"

Ms Tilley was not putting up with that for one second. "I'm not very happy that you're calling me Fat Sue – that's not my name – and I'd appreciate it if you didn't call me that." Katie quickly apologised, probably reflecting that it wouldn't do if, for instance, the terms in which newsreaders are affectionately or otherwise referred to by their long-suffering producers were ever to be made public. But what were they thinking of?

Sue Tilley, the "Benefits Supervisor" of Lucian Freud's august and grand painting, isn't someone who just stumbled into his studio one day. By all accounts, she is an impressive and intelligent woman with a keen active interest in some of the boldest art of the day. Plenty of tabloids were reportedly attempting to get her to take her clothes off again for their snappers last week, but she could see the difference between that and the noble, engaged relationship between a great painter and his model, and declined. Unlike the disposable Katie Derhams of this world, she knows very well what she is about, and she will have her reward; Sue Tilley, in this great painting, will be remembered forever.

But television is so used to the cruel exercise of its fatuous power that no-one imagined that Ms Tilley might object to being called "Fat Sue" on air. If you doubt the extent to which the dignity of human beings is assumed, by television, to be quite negligible, you might like to look at a series on Channel 4 which travels the world in search of, in succession, the world's tallest woman and the world's shortest man. There is little in any of this which can distinguish it from the 19th-century freak show.

The mind of the viewer recoils from the exhibiting of people from, often, very poor parts of the world trying to make money by public display of serious medical problems. No educational end, no justifiable entertainment is supplied by these grotesque programmes.

And it gets worse. The presenter of those freak-show programmes, one Mark Dolan, distinguished himself with a Friday night programme, also on Channel 4, called Balls of Steel, made up of outré dares and pranks played on the public. I saw one edition, a week or so back, in which a man exposed himself to a young female receptionist at a hairdressers. Subsequently, he bought a pornographic magazine in a newsagents, and began to masturbate in front of a horrified Sikh newsagent and his wife. If this was not someone with a severe mental disturbance committing a frightening crime, it was somebody simulating mental illness for our entertainment, and the terror of innocent bystanders.

All of this – the casual insult on the news, the obscene display of unfortunates, the assaults on the public – have no justification except, in the minds of those in charge, that a camera and the adverb "affectionately" were involved. Sue Tilley was absolutely right to tell Katie Derham where to get off, but that sort of objection doesn't happen often. The rest of us are all too ready to accept it when a television camera turns into a hateful, self-righteous bully.

A lesson in how to be human

After the savage murder of a beloved son, few people could bring themselves to say anything at all. Margaret Mizen, whose 16-year-old son Jimmy was stabbed to death last week, said something almost too moving to contemplate. She expressed pity for the parents of the boy who killed her son. "We've got such lovely memories of Jimmy," she said, "and they will have such sorrow about their son." To say something so psychologically perceptive at such a point shows someone who thinks and lives in the minds and troubles of others. The tragedy of someone who kills so casually is someone who can't imagine what another human is; and Margaret Mizen, left, demonstrates that what makes us human is, above all, the exercise of the imagination.

* Not long ago, it was necessary for us to have one glass of wine a day for the sake of our health. Now, according to a £10m government campaign, two glasses of wine a day are going to kill you. It can't be news to anyone that excess drinking is a great danger, but official advice ought to be rational and credible, and bear in mind that if you lived on tap water and raw carrots, you would probably die of joyless smugness pretty soon.

Anyway, looking at health advice worldwide, I see it varies to a ludicrous extent. In Canada, you are going to die if you have more than seven drinks a week. In France, you can have five drinks a day before you're in danger. In the Basque country, gloriously, you can apparently have one drink, per day, for every 12 kilos that you weigh. The best advice, surely, is that you know when you're drinking too much, and no-one should drink every day. Whether it will achieve anything to wheel out Miss Dawn Primarolo, recommending that we measure out our Chablis with medicine spoons, is another question.

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