In the US, it’s common for journalists to have a statement of ethics* detailing their conflicts of interest. Here’s mine before I get started: I used to be paid to write about TV in a column called Mic Wright’s Remotely Furious. I don’t have it any more and it makes me so bitter I could be ground up and used to make espresso. 

I love television and Twitter has only made me love it more. The obviously brilliant thing about TV tweeting is that it can elevate awful shows into an enjoyable communal experience. Realistically, Take Me Out is just Blind Date with an industrial irony shield and snappier catchphrases but on Twitter it becomes a surreal parade of curious humanity and a source of endless jokes. 

Masterchef is another show that clearly benefits from the attentions of Twitter. The peerless Greg Stekelman aka @themanwhofell whips the antics of Gregg Wallace and John Torode into a surreal whirl that both reflects what’s happening on screen and spins up a sweet and sour confection to sit alongside it. See how he told the story of the last episode here. I do my bit with Masterchef tweeting too but am very much the stumbling, bumbling Robin to Greg’s Batman. 

Outside of rotting my intellectual teeth with reality TV and cooking shows, great TV dramas hooks me and makes me return to it to gnaw on the bones, desperate to get every bit of meat from a brilliant script. I regularly feast on The West Wing and am now trying to feed my cravings with Borgen. While my favourite British dramas are still GBH and House Of Cards, recent shows like Misfits, Public Enemies, This Is England ‘88 and Inside Men have also got me hooked. 

When I had the privilege of writing my own TV column (before AOL TV was gobbled up by The Huffington Post), I tried to cover froth such as The Geordie Shore and The Only Way Is Essex as much as ‘serious’ dramas and proper documentaries. There’s as many interesting observations to be made about the fast food end of the TV schedule as there is the attempts at gourmet fare. 

While there’s plenty of choice phrases to be quoted from Charlie Brooker’s stint writing The Guardian’s Screenwipe column and his successor Grace Dent is equally brilliant with TVOD, Clive James is still my favourite TV critic of all time. The collections of his Observer TV columns, Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box are still magnificence despite some of the shows he covers having long faded from our collective memories. 

The way James sums up the short essay on his website covering his time as a TV critic, perfectly encapsulates how I feel about telly: “When I called television a curate’s cornucopia, I meant that although the abundance was good only in parts, the bits that were good were good like nothing else.” 

James’s brilliance as a TV critic was that while he was capable of amazingly acerbic about the dreck commissioners sometimes dare to shuffle at viewers, his caustic comments came from a starting point of hope about the medium’s ability to surprise and delight. And so we come to Kevin O’Sullivan, The Sunday Mirror’s TV critic. 

Not being an avid reader of The Sunday Mirror, I became familiar with O’Sullivan via his spots on Richard Bacon’s show, providing the pessimistic foil for the irrepressibly optimistic Boyd Hilton. While it’s not fair to say that Hilton will like every show he comes across, it’s usually safe to assume that O’Sullivan will despise approximately 90% of the programmes he’s asked to comment on. 

Having read his Sunday Mirror TV reviews for about two years now, I’ve come to realise that he just doesn’t really like television. Like a food critic with a vast list of allergies, O’Sullivan struggles to find anything to please his palate, dolling out miserable screeds on the shows that have particularly irked him that week.

Rather than highlighting the absurdity of the schedule’s worst shows, he comes over like an Eeyore who has not only lost his tail but found a broken remote control stapled to his arse instead. Just read his dispatch on The Only Way Is Essex and Geordie Shore from this week’s paper, peppered as it is with references to “slags” and “morons”, to see what torture he’s going through. 

And it’s not simply that he’s serving the interests of his paper’s readers, a constituency that features more than a few folk convinced that the BBC is pissing their money up the wall and that television is “all repeats. Take a look at the columns filed by his Daily Mirror colleague Jim Shelley and you’ll find someone who is clearly capable of being both acidic about the awful parts of TV and praising shows he actually likes. 

Am I jealous that Kevin O’Sullivan has a platform to talk about television in a national newspaper every Sunday? Definitely. But it’s more than that. It’s a shame to see someone consistently pump out hundreds of words on everything bad on the box and rarely flagging up the fantastic bits or even focusing on what makes the flops funny.

If I get a TV column again, I’ll criticise telly from the position of a faithful friend with a good line in quips, not someone who wishes he could put his boot through the screen. Or as Yosser Hughes more succinctly put it: gizza job. 

You can follow my tweets about television and other flotsam and jetsam of human existence @brokenbottleboy and email me via the contact link above. 

FOOTNOTES

*Paul Carr’s is easily the best of these. Read it here. 

Correction: in an earlier version of this blog post, Greg Stekelman was incorrectly referred to as “Gregg”. I apologise for the distress this has caused him. A donation of some bread will now be given to a swan who greatly enjoys Greg’s tweets.