Health: Is there any truth on TV?

Britain On The Couch; In order to gain access to subjects that pull in viewers, the producers are surrendering editorial control

am I the only person in Britain to have been offended by last week's episode of The Human Body (presented by Robert Winston) in which, after much hype, we witnessed a man die?

It is the latest in a run of recent programmes that suggest that Hello magazine TV has finally arrived. Most alarming, the minimal protest about it suggests that such tripe is what we have come to expect.

The Human Body portrayed the death from cancer of 63-year-old Herbie, but my disgust at the programme had nothing to do with the ethical issues in relation to which it was given a clean bill of health by reviewers. The moment of death has probably been shown before on television news footage, as it has in newspaper photographs. In fact, Herbie's death was about the only laudable aspect of the programme in that it helped to demystify a taboo subject.

What amazed me was that none of the reviews seemed to object to the way it was produced and its lack of scientific substance. Herbie's demise was portrayed with implacable dishonesty-by-omission and to serve a bogus purpose - in that he seemed a man concerned with truth, he died in vain.

The drama was played out in an Irish village. As Herbie's end approached, a caring local was ushered in to serenade him with an Irish folk song, 10-year-old daughter in tow. His daughter's initial reaction to a dying man whom she did not appear to know well was one of visible fear and distress. This turned out to be almost the only authentic emotion anyone displayed about the death. Apart from a very brief shot of his wife looking saddened and an even briefer one of a tearful hospice worker, that was it.

Here was a sanitised and untruthful portrait of the reactions of people to losing a loved one. The universal cycle provoked by loss of despair, anger and periodic denial of these emotions - the cycle is only absent in pathological mourning - were nowhere to be seen.

It emerged that the reason was that such emotions did not fit with the programme's thesis. Winston was taking the opportunity to serve up as science a piece of fashionable ideology. Death evolved, we were told with qualification and with absolute authority, because we have sex. Once we have reproduced our selfish genes we are surplus to requirements.

No reviewers pointed out that this is as much a speculative conjecture as the Buddhist view that there is reincarnation or the Christian one that death is a moral reckoning. It seems that critical faculties collapse when confronted by evolutionary theories these days.

Had we seen the true reactions that people have always had to death, it would have cut across the cold rationality with which we were being urged to regard Herbie's. Here was the evidence, were evidence needed, that the selfish gene theory can be extended to include all aspects of human behaviour, from gender differences through economic inequalities up to and including death itself. But as Karl Popper would have pointed out, when a theory is supposed to be able to explain everything and is not falsifiable, it ceases to be a scientific theory - it becomes an ideology.

I would have thought that even the most psychopathic of producers would think twice about grossly sentimentalising the death of a contributor and using it as a platform for speculation dressed up as science. The risk of being accused of tastelessness would seem to be huge.

But not only am I wrong, the producers were also right in terms of the public reaction. Normally hyper-critical reviewers commended the programme and I have seen no letters of complaint to newspapers. It would seem that the public also regards this bilge as acceptable entertainment.

But when you stop to think about it, this was only one of a number of examples of alarmingly corrupted factual programmes to have polluted our screens in the past fortnight. The week before, the journalist, John Diamond, might be said to have turned the tragedy of cancer into a career opportunity with a BBC1 Inside Story documentary to go with his book and newspaper columns on the subject.

No one pointed out that the subject of this supposedly objective document had a considerable influence over its content: he was the Associate Producer. Taken together with the lame Louise Woodward Panorama interview, the facile pretence of a serious discussion with Earl Spencer and the Mohammed Al Fayed-based "Diana conspiracy" documentary, these programmes suggest a worrying decline in our factual television.

In order to gain access to subjects that pull in viewers, the producers in effect surrendered editorial control.

Most worrying of all, hardly anybody seems to have noticed. It suggests that critics and public alike have simply stopped regarding these kinds of programmes as serious.