much of the medium. The useful thing about the example of the Queen is the way it demonstrates the changing imperatives, the variety of operators, the confused lines of accountability, the fact that money intrudes at every stage.

Now this is new. For most of the media, most of the time, the motivation has always been pretty simple: you grab as much of the potential audience as possible, in order that you can screw the maximum amount of money out of them. Television was different because those who made it had a different sense of intention. In those more innocent days – and it applied to both the BBC and the commercial sector, producers made programmes because they were passionately engaged with the world and wanted to communicate whatSimon Armitage’s All Points North, a memoir of his life in Yorkshire, where he was probation officer, of a home visit to see the mother of a young offender on a run-down housing estate. He found the tattered house, with an enormous half-wild Alsatian dog running around the overgrown front garden.

The mother answered the door, the Alsatian pushed past her into the house, and the probation officer and mother sat down to a cup of tea. Ten minutes into the conversation, the dog took itself off into the corner of the room and relieved itself. Copiously. The Probation Officer is first appalled, then decides to use the dog as a way into the question of the delinquent son. He plucks up the courage to ask the mother: isn’t