Superiority TV: why it's better than jeopardy TV

The most excellent Janet Street Porter has coined the term "jeopardy television" to describe the glut of programmes where there is some sort of competition, and where we the viewers can share the joy of victory and exercise our schadenfreude by pouring scorn on the losers. X Factor is perhaps the best example of this genre, though there are many others, like Strictly, Big Brother, Britain's got Talent and I'm a Celebrity.

I now propose a new category: "Superiority television", in which we see people behaving badly or illegally, and sometimes, taking the consequences of their unacceptable behaviour. Thus we, the viewers, are able to bask in a haze of euphoria and self-satisfaction as we appreciate the fact that we would never find ourselves in these predicaments because we are so much better than they are. So in this category we find all the real-life cop shows like Road Wars, Motorway Patrol and Cops (perhaps the original progenitor of all the others) as well as the hospital based shows like Sun, Sea and A and E. Finally we have programmes like The Jeremy Kyle Show where a procession of hideous low-lives are presented before us, each one with a sleazier back-story than the last, so that we may bask once again in our own superiority.

With enormous pleasure I watched two of these programmes this morning before finally climbing out of bed to do a session on my hand-weights (see how good I am?) In the first, Emergency Abroad, based around the casualty department of a Majorcan general hospital, we saw first an elderly lady with chest problems (actually she wasn't elderly; she just looked that way after a lifetime of drinking and smoking) sitting on a gurney waiting for a chest X ray while bemoaning the fact she couldn't go outside for a fag, then a young man who had fallen flat on his face after drinking ten shot-glasses of vodka and broken his nose. Finally another young man who, rendered psychotically stupid through drink, had so annoyed a local he had received a punch in the mouth which split his lip so badly it required reconstructive surgery. You see where I'm going with this?

Then it was Road Wars, where we saw a young man pulled over for erratic driving by cops prepared simply to give him a caution and allow him to continue on his way, become so aereated by being stopped that he began abusing the officers so vilely, and refusing so adamantly to "calm himself down" as he was continually urged to do, he ended up being arrested and taken to the cells for a "Section 5 public order offence" and fined 80 quid. What a fucking idiot eh? I'm glad I'm not like that, aren't you?