It's OK, admit it, you were watching television

It's lonely being a TV critic. Pitiful, some might say. But this year Thomas Sutcliffe, our chief reviewer, can hold his head high

Watching television has never been an entirely respectable activity. As a television critic this is borne in upon you with particular force, because of the gloomy knowledge that the activity to which you devote a large portion of your waking hours constitutes, for many people, a simple shorthand for mental vacancy. Two recent examples come to mind. The first occurred in the context of an industrial accident hearing, considering compensation for a man who had a red-hot metal bar lodged in his brain (he was forced to pull it out himself, a grisly scene which we can no doubt look forward to seeing reconstructed on 999). His lawyer argued that before the accident his client had been a useful member of society, a figure of ambition and drive; now, he told the court, silk handkerchief dabbing at his eyes, the poor man was reduced to watching television all day. The second turned up in this week's television profile of the comedian Peter Cook, a man who began with smart London society at his feet and finished by amassing an unmatchable knowledge of obscure cable channels. It was one thing to appear on bad television programmes, it was suggested, quite another thing to watch them. The glowing membrane of the screen effects a moral osmosis, sucking merit from those who merely watch and transferring it to the glittering creatures who are watched.

As a model for a working life you can understand that this isn't particularly appealing - a choice between sad disability or a sad dissipation of talent. So you may suspect that my motives aren't entirely pure when I try to persuade you that the past year's television has been unusually provoking. Bear with me though, because this is not an argument about quality, more a suggestion that this was a year in which television powerfully reminded us of its ability to stir people en masse, an ability that video and satellite have already begun to blur. We were reminded more than once that television may be the closest thing we have to that fabled and elusive textile - the fabric of the nation.

Sometimes this was so in a rather literal sense. When Princess Diana chose to enlist 21 million people to her personal therapy circle, she not only broke with royal convention but also raised serious constitutional issues about the future of the monarchy. Those watching did so for a huge range of motives - prurience, trepidation, gleeful republicanism, mournful fealty - but the effect of that transmission was of a moment of national attentiveness. I looked out from the Canary Wharf tower as the programme was broadcast and I don't think I was simply being fanciful in detecting an unusual lightness to the traffic that night. In television histories the Queen's Coronation is usually offered as the first great occasion of cathode-ray communion, so it's intriguing to note that, more than 40 years on, almost exactly the same number of people watched Diana strip off the dignity of monarchy as watched Elizabeth assume it in 1953. "Did you see it?" people said, in the confidence that there could be little doubt what "it" was.

Such moments are rare these days - but that wasn't the only occasion in 1995 when television forced people to abandon their own timetables for those of the broadcasters. Even in Britain, the end of the OJ trial made office workers huddle round the nearest screen, arrested by the pay- off to the year's most extended soap storyline. Even in Britain, largely protected from the twitchy derangement of round-the-clock coverage, the arrival of the verdict was a moment of signal drama, which left more than a few viewers feeling shaken in a way they couldn't quite account for. The cliched phrase about "all eyes being on you" came close to a dull statement of the facts.

For many commentators, the real guilty party in the end was television itself, culpable of transforming justice into a game-show, sullying the truth by mounting a shameless auction for pieces of it. I was less convinced myself - the great revelation of the Simpson trial (made unignorable by the circus parade that surrounded it) may have been unpalatable but it was also overdue. A crack had been widening in the national foundations and suddenly someone threw open the cellar door and let the light in.

I'm not fanciful enough to believe that American television will do much to make good the damage, but it is inaccurate to see it as causing it in the first place. What's more, though television proved an efficient conductor of base motives and crude prejudices, it also provided its own antidote. There was a certain oddity in the sight of broadsheet papers, perfectly happy to summarise coverage themselves, inveighing against the pernicious misrepresentation of broadcasting the evidence in its tedious, pernickety entirety.

Nothing else in the year could hope to match the intensity of those two television moments - though there were other interviews and other trials that commandeered our conversations. In June, Mrs Thatcher gave an audience to David Frost, reminding us of her ability to swoop instantly from beatific condescension to low junk-yard growl. She would not be returning, she said, unless her country called for her, the Maid of Grantham, in some great national emergency. The words came out soft and husky, stroking the interviewer as if he had an angora fur and was curled up in her lap. Earlier in the year, Brookside had finally bowed to the physics of patio burial - the infallible rule that what goes down must come up - and disinterred Trevor Jordache in a five-episode special that ran every night of the week. It was one of those storylines that make a spark leap between life and fiction, like the sudden jolt of tinfoil on a filling - women's groups demonstrated outside the offices of Merseyside Television, the production company which makes Brookside, and battered women wrote in their hundreds to the actress who plays Mandy Jordache.

There was much else that was memorable in the year, of course - dramas such as Jake's Progress and Les Blair's Bliss, a remarkably consistent run of observational documentaries from Modern Times, excellent one-off comedies from Andy Hamilton and the distinguished historical journalism of The Death of Yugoslavia. But where those programmes set people talking, they did so in small parishes of the national consciousness, parishes bounded by class or occupation. There are times when television can break those barriers, times when watching television isn't so much a sad demonstration of inadequacy but a participation in a national gathering.