David Aaronovitch: Can someone tell me what's going on?

The man behind 'Big Brother' and 'Brass Eye' is off to the US - David Aaronovitch wishes he was, too

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The Vicar of Dibley comes round yet again on BBC1, and Michael Jackson is off to the States. I wish I was going with him. Jackson, chief executive of Channel 4, is the most complete television person I have ever met, and I can't help wondering whether he knows something that the rest of us are only dimly beginning to realise: that the telly party's over. And that his great success, Big Brother, whose second series finished last week (in case you were vacationing on Uranus, or participating in a TV reality show) was as good as it got.

I can't account for Big Brother. My mother asked why, as a sage commentator, I thought people watched it, and I couldn't tell her; I had no idea. At least in Survivor they ate rats and had plots, but the programme's ratings failure suggests that Survivor was too intellectually taxing for the Big Brother audience. Which prefers gawping at half-a-dozen lobotomised gym-bunnies, sunning themselves dumbly, hour after hour, in the perpetual sunlight of the Big Brother yard – or else making porridge. Big Brother is a tribute to Samuel Beckett as written by William McGonagall and performed by the cast of Crossroads. True, the victory of a gay Irishman is a tribute to the cosmopolitanisation of Britain. The England of the Daily Mail is dead, but so is that of Shakespeare. "A dove's a bird, innit?" asked runner-up Helen, a living, lounging reproach to the Welsh education system. She got two million votes. Which, Helen, is a big number.

A couple of days after Jackson's announcement, Channel 4 screened the most-complained about programme in the history of British television, Chris Morris's Brass Eye. It was as though Jackson was taunting literate viewers by saying: "Look, you could have had more of this – but you opted for camp boys in shorts." Brass Eye on paedophilia reminded me of what a modern satire should be, which is a satire on ourselves. Rory Bremner does the easy trick of juxtaposing "politician" and "truth" and having everybody laugh at someone else. Morris's targets are our own susceptibilities to moral panic and tabloid judgement. We ogle the tits on a 16-year-old on page 3 of The Sun, and then go out nonce-hunting.

Even so, there is an underlying similarity between Brass Eye and Big Brother. Twenty-first-century producers know that their job is all about providing the next shock. Will Paul and Helen actually do it, Mark Rylance-style, in the nookie-shed? Tune in, and see if the shorts come off. And if they don't, we'll invent a programme where they do, as we take this year's successful formats and use the dish-culture to grow ever more hybrid, bizarre and weaker organisms. Until finally, decadent and exhausted, the strain dies out, and we cast about desperately for a new one. Meanwhile, intelligence is banished to the margins and good producers are in a state of despair about how most commissioners put scheduling way ahead of programming, ordering shows for slots and not for their intrinsic value.

The result is that, these days, I am pathetically grateful when I find something that intrigues or entertains me. I mean, actually worth the effort of sitting down in front of and lending it ears and eyes. Chris Terrill's Through the Eyes of the Young this week on BBC1 looks promising, as do the repeats of Time Team on Channel 4, or – best of all – The Office on BBC2, a brilliant naturalistic successor to The Royle Family. But it doesn't add up to enough. I feel myself slipping away from the medium I once loved.

This is one reason why I am astonished that Channel 4 has got away with taking a show such as The Sopranos off their main channel, and using it as a come-hither bribe for their over-priced digital station, E4. Had the BBC done this then the gaudily attired Gerald Kaufman of the Commons Select Committee on the Arts would be wearing Greg Dyke's guts as a novelty neck-tie by now. But with the Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, announcing last month that 30 per cent of households now have digital TV, and that this figure could be 55 per cent by 2006, most observers seem to have concluded that Channel 4 was just being canny.

That leaves 70 per cent, though, who don't have digital, and 45 per cent who won't. And they are being left with terrestrial channels that look increasingly threadbare. On BBC1 last Thursday a nadir of a kind was reached with the screening in prime time of Celebrity Sleep-over. The celebrity who slept over was, of course, Vanessa Feltz. Towards the end of the programme, in an interview with the ordinary bloke of the house, she truthfully admitted that she was "not an A-list celebrity, I know that", and further, that she generally appeared in bad TV shows. The decision by the producer to leave this line in represents the ultimate use of irony on television. She might just as well have flashed up a caption saying "you lot at home are so stupid". Tomorrow on BBC1 you can catch Danger: Celeb At Work, starring Anneka Rice. I'm not joking. It's one of the few programmes that isn't EastEnders. And to think that we once made do with one episode of Coronation Street a week.

So the story of British TV seems to me to be one of creative exhaustion, repetition and excessive cynicism, punctuated by the occasional glory. I am not worried by the sex on Channel 4, but I do loathe the ethical vacuum in which programming for the 18-30s is presented. You wouldn't know, would you, that this was a country that has an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases and a teenage pregnancy crisis? Being knowing isn't the same as actually knowing. And, although I am critical of the BBC, it alone retains a sense of social mission beyond the balance sheet and raw ratings – despite Celebrity Sleepover.

ITV and Channel 4, however, may be in trouble. Even before the long boom began to falter, there were signs that advertising revenues for the commercial channels were under pressure. Last month it was reported that the two largest ITV companies – Carlton and Granada – had both gone into the red recently. This was accompanied by an industry prediction of an 8.9 per cent fall in ITV revenues. And all this as competition for ad-watching viewers becomes more savage, a squeeze that will affect Channel 4, too. The problem is that balancing cuts in programme budgets tend to get noticed by audiences: the things that ITV does best are the high-cost, popular drama series. And ITV Digital has faltered in its competition with cable and satellite for the provision of digital services.

So some are saying that Michael Jackson, who could have taken the US job last year, or who could probably have had it next year, is leaving at the right time. The lustre of his successes will always attach to him, untarnished by the crisis that may be about to come. What he'll find by the time he returns, though, is anyone's guess. My own judgement is there will be wall-to-wall EastEnders, a reality show entitled Will They Shag? – and The Vicar of Dibley.