The media column: I'm an intelligent viewer. Get me out of here!

On Sunday night my 12-year-old daughter – a child as innocent and sweet-natured as any doomed Dickensian heroine – voted to consign another human being to a night of hell. The medium was the ITV series I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, and by phoning a particular number, Rosa could help decide which of eight minor personalities, held captive in the Australian jungle, would have to endure something horrible. When I asked her why she had chosen socialite Tara Para-Popocatepetl (or whatever her name is) to be left alone in the snake-infested forest during the hours of darkness, my darling's reasoning was straight out of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. "Because she [Tara] would be far more terrified than any of the others," Rosa replied. The little poppet!

On Sunday, in our sister newspaper, both the main responses of broadsheet journalists to this kind of populist programming were available to be read. The columnist Catherine Pepinster praised the show for its cathartic qualities, while downplaying its cruelty. Celebrity was, she wrote, not, after all, like the Roman circuses of old, where folk were torn limb from limb for the pleasure of the watching masses.

But, of course, that is exactly what it is like. Within the constraints of strict health and safety legislation (which proscribes actually killing or seriously injuring anyone on screen), Help! conforms to all the major psychological characteristics of the Roman arena. A group of unpopular ne'er-do-wells are brought into the centre of the arena, and are then slaughtered by diverse (and occasionally ingenious) means in front of a public which is empowered to save or condemn them. The only major difference is that the Romans never quite suffered from the bug-eating fetish which currently seems to be afflicting British television, and which must surely be denuding entire continents of their more revolting fauna, as they are fed to television presenters, history re-enactors and "celebrities".

The opposite tendency (as reflected in the television review on Sunday) has it, for understandable reasons, that Celebrity marks – at long last – the final scraping of the bottom of a very deep barrel. It is derivative, borrowing its presenters from Pop Idol, its hybrid structure from Survivor and Big Brother and its use of Z-list celebrities (I had never even heard of two of them) from any number of bad TV shows. And it is nasty, because it brings out the worst in us.

It's certainly true that saintly people, given the opportunity to vote a humourless, petulant, childish, pretty-boy failed singer into a stinking swamp full of snakes, would instead seek somehow to save him. Likewise good folk would derive no pleasure from hearing Christine Hamilton described to her face – rather accurately – as a "two-faced, stupid old woman" by an ex-boxer. The Archbishop of Canterbury must surely disapprove of those of us who sit, happily, wondering aloud whether there is anything in the jungle as impossibly creepy, as spine-tinglingly disgusting as Uri Geller when he is up close to a young woman.

And you do feel a bit guilty when the stupid singer and Tara Para exchange memories of their days in drug rehab, and indicate all too clearly that their pathetic need for the limelight is a product of weakness and not strength. It is like laughing at someone with Tourette's.

But here is my question. Questionable though the motives of programme-makers and viewers are (those of the participants are, frankly, pathological and require expert analysis), is this all such a downward progression, intellectually, from, say, Celebrity Squares? You may recall that this was a quiz in which a small ziggurat of minor personalities, such as Amy McDonald, assisted in the answering of bleedin' obvious questions, their every inanity applauded by a sycophantic studio audience.

Minor celebrity is not an invention of the last two decades. It's been going on since the creation of television, and bears some relation, I think, to the amassing of cigarette cards featuring cricketers or footballers. These celebrities are collectables. And I think it is probably healthier for us to laugh at them than to applaud them.

david.aaronovitch@btinternet.com