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A few comments from an American cousin. This is more anecdotal than yours (don't look for footnotes), and perhaps hopelessly digressive, but I hope you and your readers may find some of this interesting.

I first visited England in 1976. I was struck by a number of distinctions between our two nations -- our two cultures -- but three of those differences are particularly apropos to this discussion:
1) I had anticipated the standard of living would be equivalent. Instead I found England, Wales and Scotland to be poorer than the U.S. The homes were less well-appointed, the clothing of lesser quality, the cars tiny in comparison.
2) The TV sets only had two or three buttons for channels! In the United States all tvs were equipped for 50 or more channels (though nowhere was this variety actually available. In my hometown we received just three channels.) It's important to note, however, that our tv stations and networks were privately owned, while in GB the populace paid a tax for television.
3) The food, pretty much everywhere, was awful. I remember one day in desperation asking for an omelet. This, I thought, was too simple to screw up. I was wrong. It was delivered butterless and burned to a crisp.

While I have returned to England a few times in the intervening years, let's look at the circumstance I found in England in the summer of 2006, 30 years following my first introduction to Great Britain.

1) The British standard of living now matches or exceeds that of the United States. It has become a fantastically wealthy nation. For the American traveler in the 60s and 70s traveling England and the Continent was a lark -- there was little we couldn't afford with our almighty dollar. Now it is excruciatingly expensive. This, despite our own advances in productivity and our remarkably expansive economy.
2) There are dozens of channels available on British television, a direct result of the implosion of the government monopoly on broadcasting.
3) The food everywhere is vastly improved. It is now possible to discuss British cuisine without irony.

What happened to cause these changes?

It would be easy to say Margaret Thatcher happened. Thatcher, after all, loosed the iron grip of the government on production. Innovation happened. Richard Branson happened. And the gross national product of England soared. People were free to pursue their own economic ends.

(As a note to younger British readers: Do you remember George Harrison singing in Taxman, "one for you, 19 for me"? That is not hyperbole. At the time Harrison was paying 95 percent of his income to the Taxman. The old money people were safe. But those who had the tenacity and the talent to earn extravagant incomes? They were brutalized.)

I don't think it's entirely accurate to accord all of the credit to Thatcher. The British people in the latter half of the 20th century have often been remarkably fortunate in their choice of leaders. Indeed they have regularly chosen leaders whose individual greatness dwarfs that of the collective. These PMs were punished for their greatness, of course. Churchill, savior of the free world, and working toward his Nobel Prize in Literature, was considered insufficient for leadership of post-War England. Thatcher, whose efforts resulted in the great expansion of the post-War economy, was savaged as cruel and thoughtless. And then there is Tony Blair, the last balled man in England, who was called Bush's lapdog.

But to return to my point. With the efforts of England's remarkable leadership, the people were for the first time freed from the ennervating effects of endless poverty. They recovered from the lasting effects of World War II. Many were no longer required to spend all of their energy simply surviving. They had, for the first time, disposable income. In 1945, or 55, or 65, the idea of watching a show about cookery would have struck many as not just useless, but cruel. They hadn’t the means, either financial or temporal, to pursue such a frivolous pastime. But now, in 2007, they have both the time and the wherewithal for leisure and leisurely pursuits.

Are Britons newly-bored? Yes. And do they fill these empty hours with empty entertainment? Sure. This isn't a new phenomenon. As colinbaker surely knows, the Romans 2,000 years ago sated the needs of the masses with "bread and circuses." They kept the potentially unsettled populace in their place by ensuring they were fed and entertained. I believe colinbaker would suggest today's circumstance is a direct parallel.

Does he have a point? Does the new access to vast resources of entertainment keep the masses in line -- does it keep them anesthetized against societal and financial imbalances? Sure. Somewhat.

But the problem with Marxist thought it that it has to squeeze the entire human condition into an economic model. We are economic creatures, of course. But we are much more.

The difficulty with leisure is this: when we are not busy acquiring and spending, when we quiet the economic tumult in our mind, when we introspect, we often find nothing there. We find we are not comfortable with having nothing to do. We are uncomfortable with ourselves. This discomfort has often been defined as a God-shaped hole. (I've often wondered if they meant that as a verb or adjective). That is, we feel there is something more to life, and we don’t quite know what it is or how to attain it. Who would have a greater God-shaped hole than the British in 2007? Formerly the greatest race of people on earth (circa 1945), they have declined to exhibit an emptiness of spirit that would have stunned the French of the 1970s, who formerly held the record as the world's least human human beings. One result of this emptiness is the sad but much admired speech in the execrable "Love Actually." What a wheedling defense of a great nation Hugh Grant delivered! (As every good parent knows, when you have to demand respect, it's because you haven't earned it -- and you haven't earned it largely because you don't have self-respect.)

But back to my point: Britons now watch cookery shows because they can gainfully do so. They have the money, the access to foodstuffs and the leisure to enjoy what they have learned. And learning cookery, that is, the "culinary arts," is a reasonable use of time -- a profitable one, I would say, in the sense of being expansive of the soul.

Dining together is, after all, perhaps our most important social function. For an indication of that, look at the emphasis the great religions put on the communal meal. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam -- they all recognize the centrality of eating in the human experience.

In fact it's difficult for me to understand why colinbaker would choose this topic as his subject for the discussion of light entertainment. Why not cage fighting? Or (gasp) football?

Cookery, as Britons have lately discovered, can be a matter of considerable seriousness. It is a subject to which serious people can devote their lives.

There are certain additional assertions in colinbaker's thesis that also require addressing. I recognize they are part and parcel of Marxist theology, but they, like Marx, are largely dead and disproved.

1) "[Workers] have become hopelessly divided, and ultimately imprisoned, in one or other specialised economic role."
Nonsense. Fifty years ago Ireland's economy was mostly agrarian. Today Ireland is the second-largest supplier of software in the world -- second only to the United States. This radical shift was made possible by the growing acceptance of social mobility, which expands opportunities. My own story is typically American. At 22, I was the editor of a small-town newspaper. At 32 I was the manager of a country inn. At 42 I was the publisher of a successful chain of industry newsletters. At 52 I started a charter secondary school. Today I create websites for a living.


2) "Then I think, work would indeed become life's prime want because everyone would benefit by working, and not for money, but simply for the collective sake of the species. Simply to assist one's fellow being for its own sake. " This extraordinary claim has been proven false so many times it is astonishing to see it still being bandied about. The communist experiments have always produced the same disastrous results for the same self-evident reason: men are, by nature, self-interested. How many people have to die, how many people have to live in inexorable poverty, before we realize this? It cannot be changed by wishful thinking or sweet exhortation (sorry, folks, but we can't "Imagine" it into being). We can continue to repeat the disastrous mistake of ignoring this fact, or we can channel this self-interest into a mechanism that produces useful results. (Churchill put it more elegantly: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.")

3. "Culinary profiteering has naturally served to deliver obscene wealth to a minority of individuals." Please define obscene. One of my pet peeves is the belief that we should determine how much is enough. It is class envy at its worst. Some profit-taking is vulgar, but that hardly makes it obscene. And what is the option? My guess (it's only that) is that colinbaker would like to see this wealth redirected to the government coffers where the people as a whole could determine its best use. In other words, 1) we would reduce the impetus to create wealth, and 2) these "excess" funds would reasonably accrue to the "people."

Let's look at that. Perhaps we in the U.S. should have taxed the righteous crap out of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. We could have seized their profits for our collective use. What would have been the result? First, I doubt either would have worked as hard. Why should they? Second, 40 to 60 percent of the money collected would have simply disappeared in the bureaucratic miasma. That is, only 60 to 40 percent of the collected funds would have reached the target audience.

Instead, what has happened? Gates and Buffet are together giving nearly $100 billion to the charity they created, ensuring 95% or more of the funds are delivered to the people who are in need. And these aren't just handouts. Because Gates and Buffet understand the ability of money to create money, these are investments! Their investment will improve the lives of Africans and others not just for a moment, but for the foreseeable future! How different is that from government handouts, which are mostly stolen by the brutes who rule Africa with an iron fist?

Tell me. Should they have been taxed to the point where they only earned "reasonable profits"?

Do some people spend their money foolishly, or conspicuously? Sure. But the appropriate response is to laugh at them, not to impose our ideas on how their money should be spent.

4) "Why do millions of people warm so readily to such TV? What is the underlying reality motivating them to embrace TV as they do? In short, I believe in such circumstances we need to ask; what is the origin and ongoing source of social influence of these people's thinking?"

Personally, I hate TV. It is a medium for idiots. But you ask why people warm so readily to TV? The answer is simple: compared to sociologists on college campuses, or Marxists (if you'll pardon the redundancy), the people at the tv production companies truly understand human nature. They don't gloss, nor do they see sophistication where none exists. They don't deny the truth of many stereotypes. Their only purpose is to make money, and they do that by maximizing the number of people who watch their shows. Are the results mind-bogglingly awful? Sure.

In fact I would say the only thing worse than TV for the masses is TV engineered by the government -- TV designed not by entrepreneurs, but by our masters. TV, as they would surely say, that is good for us.