The reality is that TV is teaching school-bullying

He was, in many ways, the godfather of so-called reality TV, and now he's appalled at the modern development of the genre he launched with his 1974 fly-on-the- wall series The Family. Paul Watson has since been responsible for many fine documentaries, an achievement which won him a special Bafta award last weekend. He used his thank-you slot to hit out at what he termed the bullying and sneering culture of so much that passes as mainstream entertainment. He is not alone in believing that TV has taken an unsavoury route to ratings success with programmes in which a core ingredient is the ritual humiliation of the participants.