Just how much of an anything-goes medium should television become?

It took a major shift towards free-for-all with this week's news that the Independent Television Commission is proposing to lift 16 specific advertising bans and relax eight more in its code of advertising standards and practices.

So we could soon be seeing commercials for faith healers, occult practices and even escort agencies on our screens - as well as news readers endorsing various products.

It all adds to the impression that British television, once the envy of the world, is going to the dogs. In fact, it's already gone there, if you watch Channel 4 late on Friday evening.

I was alerted to the shameful show Dotcomedy by reader Geoff Hargreaves, who found himself watching it when, returning home late, he switched on his telly prior to viewing something he'd recorded from earlier in the evening.

The programme presents some of the more bizarre items trawled from the sump of the internet.

"It's very low comedy, dreadfully vulgar," Geoff told me. "I was particularly disgusted by an image of the Queen Mother with large bare breasts drooping over a table. It was absolutely sickening. To do this to a woman who is nearing her hundredth birthday is awful. There are so many taboos these days with political correctness, so instead they belittle someone who can't answer back."

And Geoff added: "Anyway, watch this programme next week, if you can bear to, and see for yourself."

So I did, and to be honest I wished I hadn't. This is a show that makes Eurotrash seem a model of sophistication. It didn't so much offend me with its crude, puerile attempts at humour based on images of the ruder parts of the anatomy and the uttering of "naughty words". I've been around a long time and don't shock easily.

What it did do was insult my intelligence. And it also made me sad that its young presenters - a lad who looked as though he belonged in a sixth form somewhere and a sweet-faced blonde with a foul mouth - and its youthful audience had nothing more constructive to do with their time.

If this is the way ahead for commercial television, it becomes more important than ever that the BBC stays outside the fray and continues to make quality programmes designed to offer a moral and intellectual uplift.

It should leave well alone the sewers occupied by the likes of Dotcomedy.

e-mail:mike.priestley

@bradford.newsquest.co.uk

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.