TV in pubs has killed conversation, claims Mike Wade. Not so, argues author Ian Rankin. the pair sit down to debate the issue � over a quiet pint

IT sounds like the worst kind of joke. There are these two blokes arguing in a pub. One man, his face growing redder and redder, insists that the proliferation of television screens is destroying the traditional Scottish bar by killing the art of conversation. The other - in the person of Ian Rankin, the Edinburgh crime writer who plots his novels through a glass, darkly - says mildly that his companion is spouting much hot air.

To help advance his view, Rankin has theorised that his companion is possibly a little paranoid. Perhaps, Rankin suggests with a snigger, whenever his red-faced friend walks into a bar, someone switches on a telly just to annoy him: "Or maybe you're just a jinx."

Maybe. But I am that red-faced man and a graduate of the hard-drinking school of journalism. Years of observation and a heavy use of alcohol have convinced me that pubs - to be specific, traditional one-room Scottish bars - are spiralling into decline.

This is the problem as I see it, I tell Rankin. Faced with a disastrous slump in sales, landlords and pub owners appear to have come to the decision that the only way they can make a living is to install large numbers of televisions. But what began about 10 years ago as a decent and occasional bit of craic for punters has degenerated into an everyday experience and now it is commonplace to find four or more screens in a single bar. The effect of wall-to-wall television on social life is disastrous.

This is my evidence. Go into virtually any bar on match day and the chances are that all heads will be tilted upwards, looking at a screen. Silence reigns, beyond the "oohs" and "aahs" of the action, and the cackle of the commentary.

It is at its worst at the weekends, when pubs should be somewhere to relax and enjoy good company. Instead, on Saturday afternoons, like wildebeest, herds of fat-bellied men graze over their pints, gawping as the football scores tick through under the image of the SkySports news presenters. On Sundays, with a nod at the notion of "a family day", the same men return with wives or girlfriends, who sit reading papers, while their partners yell insults at the live games which play overhead all afternoon.

Rankin does not share my pessimism. He has recently written the introduction to an Edinburgh pub guide, and his face peers out of a poster advertisement for a local beer. Last week, he says, he spent a day crawling through some of the city's most famous bars - Sandy Bell's, Deacon Brodie's Tavern and the World's End. Though there was a television in every one of them, conversation never hit the buffers.

To thrash out our differences, we have agreed to meet on Rose Street, Edinburgh's most famous boozing thoroughfare, which is home to around 20 bars in just four short blocks.

This is a street that became a home-from-home for writers and artists such as Hugh MacDiarmid, John Bellany and George Mackay Brown; which could boast a great Victorian "palace" in the Kenilworth, alongside cosy little locals, disco pubs, tourist traps, and every other kind of bar you could imagine. Rose Street even had a gay scene before gay scenes existed.

But in this age of subscription sports channels, the bulk of Rose Street's pubs have lost their individuality and most can be characterised as "telly bars". At the west end, the most unprepossessing establishments are almost indistinguishable from the bookmakers which sit in their midst: look through the plate glass windows and you will see men's heads gazing at the screens, gripping pints instead of betting slips.

East, in the sadly diminished Kenilworth, there is a TV in every corner, and here, as in many other bars in the street, the staff often choose to blend sports action with loud music playing over the speakers. Today, you probably won't be able to hear the voices of the commentators over the din of the muzak, if by the remotest chance you are interested in the outcome of Burnley versus Arsenal (live on TV, 2pm).

You can see sights and sounds like these all over the city. But not, apparently, in the boozers Rankin frequents. To prove his point, at his suggestion we have met up in Milne's Bar, whose policy stands defiantly against the trend. Television is banned and the bar is filled with the best kind of music: the hum of conversation. Rankin is delighted with the ambience and shakes his head at all my arguments.

"I drink in a lot of places and I don't think many of them have changed that much," he says. "A lot of the traditional bars and neighbourhood bars have certain protocols and certain kinds of behaviour are not going to be allowed. What you find is that there are almost unwritten rules. It's like being a member of the Masons. People know that if you do certain things you will be out."

Rankin favours old-fashioned places, which he believes are microcosms of the communities that surround them. At his local, there is a plumber and an electrician who can often find work among the other patrons. A bookseller he knows helped another customer by locating a rare work on his behalf.

"It's like a club," he says. "Everybody knows everybody else, everyone's got something to offer. I love that. Go into a new pub and immediately well, no pub in Scotland makes you immediately welcome, you have to earn it by showing you're not going to kick up a fuss or start a fight. But if you do that two or three times, then the next time you go in, you'll be fine."

Even where a pub has a television, research suggests that it can oil the wheels of conversation. TV can create a common knowledge - through the pervasive obsession with soap operas, for example, or a general fascination with a big news story. These shared experiences - say the social scientists - encourage people to exchange views with strangers. That is all to the good.

Rankin sees other ways in which a television can even help heat up conviviality. "Scots are very bad at personal interaction," he reckons. "Some people find eye contact difficult. They tend to look anywhere except at you, because they are shy or embarrassed. If there is a telly, there's an excuse not to look at you. That can help conversation. It's a way of not looking at you, but you can still focus on the conversation."

As for the sports-loving pubs on Rose Street, argues Rankin, many of these premises have unusual characteristics which have evolved to meet the needs of their ever-changing clientele.

"This whole street has an extraordinary moving population," he says. "You get tourists arriving for a day or two and then they are never seen again. There are football or rugby fans who come here because it's the only place they've heard of and there isn't a bar nearby on Princes Street. But it's never been the kind of place regulars go."

But my point is that there is an ever decreasing number of traditional pubs in Edinburgh or elsewhere, and there is a whole sheaf of evidence, anecdotal and otherwise to bear me out.

Pubs are under pressure. Beer sales over the counter have shrunk by almost 50% in Britain, since they peaked in 1979 - consumption is down seven million pints per day. Top those figures up with the smoking ban and the price-cutting of alcohol in supermarkets, and it is easy to see why bars put their faith in sports channels to draw in trade.

In Glasgow, I talk to the author William McIlvanney, who longs for the days when people gathered in a bar "like a Bedouin tribesman around an oasis just to discuss the way things are". McIlvanney believes that "a whole verbal culture" is under threat from television, and that nuances of speech and conversation are being flattened out. As if to prove his point, the Horseshoe Bar, the city's most famous talking shop, has a television on every gantry.

Paddy O'Donnell, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, has no doubt that pub culture has changed for the worse. Pub clientele is less numerous, but those who drink tend to be younger and more inebriated than their more restrained forebears. He makes a link with the ban on drinking in football grounds after violent clashes in the 1980 Scottish Cup Final and all major stadia becoming all-seater in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. "What we now have is pubs where people can stand up, drink in the way they used to on the terracing," muses O'Donnell. "The terraces have been replaced by the local pub."

Another change in pub culture has been picked up by sociolinguists as much as it has been observed by licensees. Mobile phones, iPods and laptops have all changed the ways in which people communicate. For a landlord like Dave Waterson, chief executive of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association, this has created a new breed of young customer, one who is not used to talking to bar staff.

"The sociability, the craic, the banter between people is diminishing," says Waterson. "I've worked in pubs where young people have come in, and if you say hello from the bar, they get a fright. Because nobody ever says anything to them."

Rankin admits that this trend among the young clientele has made an impact. "There is a younger generation who only communicate with themselves. They have all the latest technology but they don't relate well to the outside world. Solipsistic is the word for this. There is a whole generation out there wired into a world that isn't in the here and now."

Televisions in bars do these kinds of people a favour, Rankin reckons. They don't have to relate to the world around them. "It's not that that they want the television, it's that they need it because they don't want to communicate with the outside world."

But still, Rankin draws a distinction between traditional bars and the rest. So what if a pub has four TVs? "I wouldn't go in a sports bar," he says, insisting there are plenty of others to choose from in Edinburgh. He reels them off: The Royal Oak, Kay's, Cafe Royal, Bennet's, Swanny's, Canny Man's, The Guildford, The Oxford, The Cumberland, Clarks and The Abbotsford. Many of these pubs do in fact have television sets, though Rankin appears to have been so engrossed in the chat, he just hasn't noticed. I would be seething.

We are at loggerheads again. And then Rankin moves the conversation to the kinds of places he doesn't like. "Style bars," he says, laying down an empty glass with a thud. "I don't do style bars or those nightclubby things. The best bars have good beer and good conversation. And they are places where you are never expected to get up and dance."

Amen, at least, to that.