TV used to be all about t-ts and teeth — look at Graham Kennedy, and he could make you laugh as well. It seems, if what we hear about Nine news chief John Westacott is to be believed, that things have moved on since the medium’s innocent salad days, happier times when an amiable poof could be the housewife’s friend.

Selection policy, at least in the Nine newsroom, now seems to border on the gynaecological. But perhaps the broader argument is not with the practitioners and their tawdry casting couch preferences, but with the medium itself. Our mistake is probably to imagine that television could ever be about more than mere appearance and superficiality. It couldn’t, could it?