Sex, lies and videotape ... can we ever trust TV again?

I BELIEVE that I worked for most of my life in the golden age of television. Factual programmes were truthful, entertainment programmes were cheerful, and seeing was believing. But that was a while ago.

Now, it seems, we live in an age where the only truth is a lie. We have no way of knowing whether what the television companies present us with is true or false, accurate or totally fraudulent. The bond of trust is broken.

The most conspicuous frauds, unmasked last week by The Mirror, are in the confessional chat shows. These are modelled closely on originals drawn from the great wasteland of American television. We now know that in many cases guests laying bare their personal histories were actors and impersonators. And that they were paid for their lies.

Am I surprised? Sadly, not at all.

The chat shows' carelessness with the truth is the inevitable outcome of a TV culture in which nothing matters but money and ratings. Producers and researchers are under pressure to deliver large audiences. Their jobs depend on it. The advertisers demand it. And all too often the truth is twisted to achieve it.

I would note in passing that the original "Vanessa" and the present "Trisha" shows both came from Anglia Television in Norwich. When I started in TV as an apprentice reporter I used to compete with Anglia. They were a formidable and respected company, well rooted in the community. Their particular strengths were their local news and their wildlife series.

But that was then and this is now. What happened to Anglia was repeated across the entire landscape of TV - including even some parts of the BBC.

The bean counters prevailed. Levels of staffing were cut back to the minimum. Nothing mattered but the bottom line.

Confessional chat shows are hardly creative television. But they harvest the ratings, and are cheap to make. They are often recorded back to back, two or three at a time, in the same studio and in front of the same audiences. All they need is a constant flow of guests with attention-getting tales to tell, usually from the wilder and weirder shores of human relationships. Small wonder that members of the cast of these rolling freak shows are not always quite what they seem.

This is not a personal attack on Vanessa Feltz. I have my own confession to make. I was once on her couch on the Big Breakfast, being interviewed about war zones. It was, under the circumstances, a rather crowded couch, but she was well- informed and very good at her job. I feel for her now. I believe she has been duped. And so has Trisha over at Anglia Television.

The present scandal has rocked an industry still reeling from the last one. Carlton's partly faked documentary "The Connection", for which it was heavily fined, exposed a style of programme making which would shade whatever truths were necessary to produce the sort of product which the market demanded. The documentary's aim was more ambitious than that of the daily chat shows. It was to deliver not only ratings but prestige and prizes. And until the fraud was exposed, it duly did so.

Viewers are now quite properly asking, what can they trust any more? The answer, of course, is most of what they see. There are still a lot of honest programme makers out there.

The news, for a start, is widely and rightly trusted. Michael Buerke and Trevor MacDonald may not have the full story to hand on the Nine O'Clock News and News at Ten, but they will tell you no lies.

I am sure the same will apply to ITN's new News at 6.30 - although the move of the flagship news programme to the margins of prime time is also a consequence of the scramble for ratings.

And ITV should take heed of what happens to those who worship exclusively at the altar of ratings.

Even news doesn't have a blameless record. I know of one case where a fraud was attempted, and of two which actually appeared on a news programme. One was simulated news footage, the other a fabricated story about the victim of an earthquake. They were well known in the business. I mentioned them to senior executives of the organisations concerned. Neither wanted to know.

It was some time after that I left journalism, a profession that stands low in public esteem, for politics, which stands even lower. But the latest revelations make politics seem a relatively honest business. I really think it's as bad as that.

So what's to be done? The easy answer is that TV must clean up its act.

This scandal has sent shockwaves through the industry. Just as the activities of a small number of MPs affected the reputation of Parliament as a whole, so the great majority of honest TV producers and researchers are finding everything they do is under suspicion. It will take the public trust in television a long time to recover.

It would be a helpful start if the "great and good" of TV, the veterans of its golden age who are now among its senior executives, were to concern themselves again with the nuts and bolts of programme making.

TV, like Parliament itself, can no longer be assumed to be a league of gentleman. Searching questions - and even offensive ones - will have to be asked, not when a programme is finished, but even while it is being made. There should also be a blacklist of shady producers.

And the Royal Television Society, which confines itself mainly to seminars and the distribution of prizes, could concern itself with these issues of dishonesty which have brought such shame to the medium.

In Britain we used to have not just the best television in the world, but the most trustworthy. We can still retrieve it. But we must learn again the most important lesson of all - that programmes always matter more than profits.

Enough of sleaze - in TV as in politics.

Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent, is now MP for Tatton.

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