Dear diary, what of TV’s future?

One of the more depressing inevitabilities of having a TV career is all you talk about is the dry, business end of telly. The petty politics of who is in charge of which indie, who is being promoted, who is shagging whom and who is for the chop. You see it whenever producers gather; the actual programmes are forgotten as everyone outdoes each other with the latest industry gossip.

It wasn’t always this way. No one ever got into telly because they were obsessed with foreign rights, share options or ancillary revenue from DVD sales. It was all about the actual TV shows we were watching as children and those characters, stories or presenters we idolised from our sofas.

Apologies if I sound weirdly nostalgic, but I just stumbled across my 1982 diary (back when I was a 16-year-old schoolboy). Re-reading it, I was shocked at the tiny spidery writing in green ink and just how banal my memories seem more than 30 years on. Despite the first fumblings of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, all I wrote were dull remarks about the weather or washing my hair. Sadly, despite my literary pretensions, I was no Anne Frank, or Samuel Pepys; not even Adrian Mole.

But before I threw it away, there was one thing that did shine out: TV. Bizarrely, every day, along with my haircare regime and weather report, I carefully annotated and listed the programmes I had watched, from The Gentle Touch, Oxford Road Show, Shine On Harvey Moon and M*A*S*H to Hart To Hart and OTT (a dreadful late night Tiswas spin-off). In those early VHS days, I watched everything and loved it all passionately and obsessively.

I’d wanted to become an academic, but no wonder I ended up a producer. Here was proof that TV dominated and defined my life for more than four decades – and that will probably continue until my dying day, if the industry lasts that long.

But is it still like that – and does anyone even keep a diary now? More importantly, do the producers of tomorrow still ‘love’ TV? Do teens ever stop snapchatting photos of their genitals long enough to even notice something as superb as Happy Valley, as funny as Alan Partridge: Mid Morning Matters or as groundbreaking as Inside Amy Schumer?

I wonder what kind of people will end up as programme-makers in 20 years’ time. How will they understand what telly is when they don’t bother to watch it? (If you don’t believe me, just ask any child these days and they’ll proudly boast that they don’t watch or care about TV. Then punch them hard right in their ‘no-fillings’ teeth. Ta).

But seriously: is this studied indifference good for the industry and the quality of ideas needed for future shows? Netflix’s model is already breaking TV’s control on people’s daily lives – no one bothers to stay in to watch something they can binge on later. YouTube is even more insidious – why bother sitting through the majority of the episode when you can go straight to a 30-second clip of the climax?

BTW, before any bright young thing damns me for my boring old-fartery, read this no-holds-barred entry from 13 January 1982: ‘Tried to light a fart – no luck!’ Now that’s a killer TV format right there.

Right, I’m off to wash my hair.

Steven D Wright is an entertainment producer