Stuart Jeffries sabotages his remit almost from the off. We’re threatened a trawl through thirty years of British TV from a man who, at thirty-six, was pretty much mothered, Homer Simpson style, by The Box. But once past some frankly tedious sepia-tinted guff about bloody Bill and Ben and egg custard, his Guardian training kicks in and we begin to pick our way through these particular cathode rays with more consternation and anger than irony. This is a book, after all, that manages to quote both the venerable Mollie Sugden and Jean Baudrillard.

Take, for example, Jeffries’ dissection of conflict on TV. It’s a barely suppressed tirade against the Clintonite-Blair philosophy of the clean war; pioneered in The Falklands, perfected in The Gulf and Serbia. He eulogises Peter Watkins’ Culloden and still seethes that the BBC went on to ban The War Game because, Watkins was told, twenty thousand people would commit suicide if it aired.

Elsewhere, the argument has much to do with what he sees as the medium’s New Labour-style abandonment of old-style principle and promise: "A dizzying loss of centre and choices that never satisfy." From his single-knob Pye beginnings to the new SKY-high multi-channel digital present, Jeffries feels that the covenant to inform as well as entertain has been broken. "We know next to nothing about philosophy thanks to television," he writes, "but lots about the nocturnal habits of cute animals."

What he likes are The Simpsons, the wonderful Chris Morris and that episode of the ludicrously entertaining Changing Rooms that reduced one poor woman to tears. Unlike many, he doesn’t look across the Atlantic for salvation either. "This was the moral I took away from American drama: nice apartment, shame about the political message"

And that title? Make no mistake, Jeffries is no fool. He’s savage with Are You Being Served?, that great "unintentional critique of post-imperialist culture and British sexual repression." And while that might at first appear rather akin to taking an artillery shell to a trifle, his nailing of Grace Bros.’ barely disguised homophobia and misogyny is persuasive. The equally pernicious It Ain’t Half Hot Mum somehow escapes his gaze, but a swipe at Royal lackey Billy Connolly, as a reactionary who serves the comedy of false assumption, is long overdue.

And yet, these are the cultural touchstones TV seemingly embraces, while programming with an agenda that either defies the middle class or scares the horses is routinely vilified. "The pretence of offence...is what keeps The Daily Mail, that bastion of British ethical duplicity, in white-hot moral rage year in year out," he writes. Recommended.