It doesn’t help that this latest series has seen all the same clichés spilling out onto our screens once again. Too many of the same old freaks are attempting to ‘live the dream’. There’s Janey Cutler, who is clearly is in line to be the next attempted SuBo; there’s a comeback kid in the shape of the drummer who was awful last time but in the running again because everybody loves an underdog; there’s the same old ‘outrageous’ acts that Simon can make a pretence of being turned on by.

And that’s not to mention the endless slew of small, speechless children in tears, dog acts and double acts with one partner is better than the other – whom Simon will invariably offer a ‘choice’ having stopped the act midway through.

I suspect that there is a fair amount of ‘freak show disconnect’ amongst the British public, and that they are getting less and less interested. Has Britain’s Got Talent got enough tricks up its collective sleeve to engage conversation and journalists or has it gone the way of Big Brother and lost interest to formula and over-scripting?

The fact that they use the same old script, from tired critique to equally tired enthusiasm, can pall. All the people who ‘are here to win’, are or want to put their hometown ‘on the map’ need, perhaps, to find a talent for original sentiments. And the judges too: how many times have you heard them say ‘I wasn’t expecting that’, ‘you’ve got three yeses’ or ‘that was my favourite by far’? Frankly, if the judges got goose bumps every time they claimed to, they’d probably develop a serious skin complaint.

Barnum knew that if you put extraordinary freaks together you would have a show. He also knew that you had to have something more than just shock value, cheap laughs and a relentlessly repetitious ‘live the dream’ style script. Talent runs deeper than that, and, though the public like formula, a Saturday night TV show has to have some substance and show some willingness to move forward if it is to survive.

There’s an enormous amount of talent out there – just look at the kid doing a Lady Gaga cover on the net who garnered 8.5 million YouTube hits in three days. He’s doing well because he’s writing his own script, not submitting to the tired formulas of others.

So is the reality bubble punctured? Talent shows have come and gone, but this one has to survive, if only to provide much needed advertising revenue. All shows dip into decline. Has this format got the power to survive longer than most?

One thing’s for certain – if it fails, then we are likely to see significant cracks forming in the Cowell Empire. I will be looking for a demonstration of truly potent PR skills in the coming weeks. Britain’s Got Talent needs to create serious engagement before the audience begin to opt out in far bigger numbers.

The debate was well attended; over two thirds full. Joining me to argue for the proposition were Max Clifford and the retiring Union president, Jonathan Laurence. Opposing the motion were Times journalist Hugo Rifkind, showbiz writer Zoe Griffin and James McQuillan, who appeared on The Apprentice.

The other speakers last night went for a comic interpretation of the motion. My technique was more serious-minded, more Old Testament – Quentin Tarantino fans might have deduced I was trying to mimic Samuel L Jackson’s famous biblical Pulp Fiction speech.

I was attempting to play devil’s advocate as well as being more deliberately, obviously provocative. Max was off-the-cuff languid and crammed his speech with career anecdotes. He opened by defending good Reality TV – no surprise, as his chief paymaster is Simon Cowell.

The others were a mixed bag, going for laughs. Hugo Rifkind, the leader writer for the Times, was very good, and reminded the room of some of the bad stuff. He went for Max as the real reason for the negative residue from reality TV, suggesting that Max has promoted and created many poor role models.

Zoe Griffin praised the stars that Reality TV has bred, highlighting Ben Fogle and Myleene Klass, as well praising the revenue Reality TV has generated for the GNP. I wasn’t all that sure about her argument, but she looked great in a fab frock. James McQuillan was pure stand up and self-deprecation – he treated the whole night as if it was a task on The Apprentice.

I am pleased to report Jonathan, Max and I went away winners by 5 votes – a very tight call. Winning, I am told, is a significant tick on the CV – this is, after all, the oldest and one of the most prestigious debating societies in the world.

Below is the transcript of the speech I gave.

President, ladies and gentlemen – good evening.

The very fact that Max Clifford is prepared to publicly bite the hand that feeds him is a measure of the seriousness of the situation our society now finds itself in.

There have always been celebrities, of course. Every culture under the sun reveres fame. Heracles or Odysseus, John Lennon or Joan of Arc – we know without doubt that certain people’s astonishing adventures, thoughts, ideas, poems, novels or battles will live on throughout the ages.

But it is becoming harder and harder for these people to be heard over the slew and spew of information in a world that runs on instant access

So what has changed? What is different about modern celebrity that makes it so uniquely corrosive?

Let me take you back to 1834, when that true genius of celebrity, PT Barnum, moved to New York and discovered the astounding commercial potential of the human freak show. Today, we may disapprove of exhibiting physically deformed men and women for profit.

But I ask you: is Jeremy Kyle any different?

And by Jeremy Kyle, I mean Jerry Springer, the opening rounds of the X Factor and everything else in this degrading morass of reality TV that a British crown court judge aptly called: “a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people whose lives are in turmoil.”

There can be little doubt that so-called “reality” television – an oxymoron if ever there was one – is responsible for this perversion.

The gospel of Reality Television is easy to understand. Everyone can be a celebrity. No skills are necessary. And low emotional IQ is a major advantage.

Today’s get-known-quick generation think that fame is an end in itself and that work is for losers. The Reality TV generation seek notoriety in the mistaken belief that it is the same thing as eminence, distinction or achievement.

They have been conned.

Reality TV is a reductive force, which exists in a self-serving media bubble – a cosy pact between format owners and media barons. Now, if that were all it is, that would be bad enough – a modern-day equivalent of Barnum’s freak show… unedifying, but pretty harmless in small doses.

But that is far from its true nature.

In this shallow and foetid Petri dish, we are growing a phoney society. One where 14 year old girls can appear on daytime TV to tell the world that their admiration of Katie Price is so great that they are being remodelled to look like her – because they believe that this alone will make them famous!

Please note, in passing, that beauty is almost always placed at a premium as a culture collapses.

Indeed, it was Eleanor Roosevelt who remarked that:

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

On this logarithmic scale, our Reality TV-plagued society is surely due to disappear up its own neocortex.

Psychologist Jean M. Twenge cites a telling indicator in her book Generation Me. In the 1950s, she says, just twelve percent of teens age fourteen to sixteen agreed with the statement: “I am an important person.” Yet by the late 1990s, seven times that number—eighty percent—of teens said they agreed with it.

Of course one needs belief in oneself to do well, to become more than the sum of your parts – but this rampant “self-esteem” is in truth narcissism by another name.

And as I think we can all agree, the seemingly easy route to fame that Reality TV affords is opium to the narcissist’s addiction. We risk breeding an entire generation that doesn’t understand, or want to understand, that nothing worth having comes easily.

In the ten mind-numbing years since Big Brother appeared on our screens, Reality TV has become a major force in our society. It feeds people’s hopes and dreams with a progression of sound bites that illuminate nothing but a phoney ersatz nirvana. Beyond our shores, the West is spreading a ‘fame virus’, seemingly unaware of the spread and effects of the contagion, which by any measure is now a pandemic. Countless children and young adults across the globe are desperate to “live the dream”, unaware that they aren’t even dreaming of a life.

Where, then, are the real heroes? When society genuflects toward plasticated icons of fame, they cannot see real heroes. They miss out on the subtler role models, can see no positive illustrations of value, of worth. And this, too, is one more consequence of Reality TV culture (another oxymoron). It makes it less likely for anyone with genuine, hard-earned talents to make an impact on the world at large.

Ladies and gentlemen, the motion tonight is well-worded

Wretched.

What an appropriate description for our current national psyche.

Perhaps in a country where trade and industry have been reduced to a trickle, where blue collars have nearly all been bleached white, there is little else for the young to do but dream of glory in what seems the best way available. That, at least, is understandable.

Less pardonable is an education system that plays along with this mass deception. I, for one, believe that our children deserve better.

But where will this end?

As a culture, we appear to be moving into a world run on Reality TV rules, insane prospect though that is. Our religion is celebrity. Our sense of community has been reduced to slots on a TV scheduler’s spreadsheet. Our conversation is piped to us via the tabloid media. All plastic, and all thoroughly wretched.

Meanwhile, we are losing the richness of life to a monochrome, reductive view of the world where too many people have been lead to believe by media moguls and TV producers that they too can be demi-gods, without putting in the work or even deserving the worship.

We live in a culture that agrees with Keats that Beauty is Truth.

However, we seem to have forgotten the second part of the famous close to Ode to a Grecian Urn: that Truth is Beauty, also.

Truth, today, is lost in a manufactured version of reality populated by beautiful, synthetic people. And the world suffers for it as more and more strive to be perfect, useless people whose only ability appears to be rich, pretty and unhappy.

Historian C.D. Odell claimed that: “the freaks of the dime museum served the purpose of raiding dull persons from the throws of their inferiority complexes”. Freaks served to boost the punter’s self esteem. The same could be said of watching Jeremy Kyle, but for the fact that so many people watch and decide that they will go on the show to claim their moment of fame – amplifying their internal deformities to please the audience.

Reality TV is, I believe, a tranquilizer for the masses, as the freak shows were in the dime museum days. But instead of people thinking ‘thank god I’m not like that’, they are now thinking ‘it could be me’ and they go out of their way to get chosen for reality TV shows. They freak themselves up to have a better chance of getting on the show.

The divide between rich and poor is bigger than it’s been in a very long time at the moment, but the overriding mood is apathy. Where once people rioted – against the poll tax, in Toxteth and Brixton – due to high level of discontent – they are now opiated by Reality TV. It has produced apathy amongst the young.

Where once you had to be talented to be famous and make money, now you don’t.

Literally anybody has a chance at being picked for a reality TV show and with that comes a certain fame and capacity to earn money – for a little while. The “ it could be you” phenomenon drives the apathy to fight back and reduces the need to have any opinion about our society. Governments won’t change anything because we are given a (false) sense of hope which keeps up down.

And consider this.

Consider it and weep.

More young people have voted on TV shows such as Big Brother and the X Factor than vote in major political elections.

You may be wondering whether I’m over-egging it. Whether, in fact, Reality TV has some beneficial side effects that I’m concealing from you? As entertainment, surely it must at least make us happy?

Actually, no. It drives young people and children to be more self-obsessed, more beautiful, more perfect, more grown up and more miserable in an attempt to gain fame and money.

In a 2007 Unicef survey, more than a quarter of the British children polled (27%) agreed with the statement: “I often feel depressed.”

What made children saddest, in this survey, was their appearance. Almost a fifth, of both sexes, were unhappy with how they looked. A study by the Girl Guides recently discovered that 46% of girls aged 11 to 16 would consider cosmetic surgery and that girls started to find fault with their appearance as early as 10 or 11. Reality TV has created a generation that believe fame and celebrity is their birthright and who cannot function properly because they feel they must make themselves look better to achieve all they desire.

One thing is certain; our moral compass has found a new magnetic field; one that points out a new slant on Oscar Wilde’s famous epigram: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

This is a generation growing up hooked on fast story lines and an optimistic, unrealistic view of reality. A generation growing up believing that they are in the stars and barely registering that they are staring straight into the gutter and have been for years.

I urge you to vote in favour of tonight’s motion.

It is well past the time that someone came up with something new; startlingly, compellingly new and strange that we can all rail against and then learn to love. Instead, 2010 offers a year of slight tweaks, starting with the Apple brand in the shape of the rumoured iSlate – which, if it is more than mere rumour, will be a rather obvious cross between the iPhone and iMac.

There will also surely be more of the same from the performing poodles at Downing Street, searching for the perfect soundbite to distract from wrong-doings via the medium of Twitter and YouTube. An election will not change this quest – we have spent the last 35 years learning that it really is the case that the Government always gets in. With worrying certainty, the BNP will be attempting to build on their form at the election – and may do better than they deserve if, as I suspect, the expenses scandal makes a comeback for the campaign period.

From racism, we move to sexism and agism. One can only hope that the BBC will cease and desist in its attempts to refresh struggling brands in a way that suggests that the execs at the BBC are interested only in chasing ratings. Ironically, their attempts are usually at the expense of ratings – as happened with Alesha Dixon’s arrival on Strictly Come Dancing last year replacing the older, smarter but less obviously attractive Arlene Phillips.

This will be yet another X Factor year, too, a year of Tiger Woods remaining in the news as he attempts to salvage his brand, a year of uber-comedians like Michael Macintyre (how long is it since comedy was last pushed as the new rock and roll?), a year of Katie Price and Peter Andre maintaining their presence in the media (already two of Katie’s exes are rumoured to have been fighting on Celebrity Big Brother).

I can well imagine that someone will fill Jan Moir’s shoes as ‘most hated journalist’ after making off colour remarks about a dead celebrity this year. You never know, it might even be Jan Moir again.

Stephen Fry will doubtless be continuing his on-again-off-again affair with Twitter (he’s currently away for some months as he writes a book – a better get-out than reacting to accusations of tediousness as he did last year); brands like Coca Cola will surely continue to try and hijack social media for their own ends; stars will attempt to ride the notoriety of other stars a la Sacha Baron Cohen, as Bruno, descending on Eminem at an awards ceremony – a stunt which had to be retrofitted as prearranged after the rapper appeared to take serious umbrage.

As global warming seems to be blurring the seasons, I am left wondering if someone hasn’t simply decided to replace nature’s seasons with commercial seasons; a cycle that allows us to put the world in some sort of order, however facile. If I’m right – and not just jaundiced – then the commercial seasons are driven by Simon Cowell, movies, fashion and human frailty. Technology changes the way things work at a ferocious rate – we need something to hide behind, especially as the bodies of soldiers continue to come back in bodybags and we lose control of the things we understand.

But this patina of formula also destroys innovation, so unless someone breaks through it and brings something new – as well as a furious amount of energy – to the mix, we are doomed to another stifling year of more of the same…

My reluctance to comment changed when I read Jan Moir’s fantastic assassination of Katie in the Mail: “Sweet kangaroo cutlets, what have we here? Katie Price back in the jungle again? How much more of boobilicious, publicity-mad She-Chav Katie can we take?”

Jordan, the goddess of the tabloid centre spread, is seriously wounded; instead of avoiding jet lag by popping into a rehab clinic (on discounted rate for the assured media coverage) she has placed her surgically engineered torso back in the reality stocks. Is it a hapless move to rehabilitate her image in the public eye or an unrecoverable PR disaster? I am sure the audience can spot the PR conceit and are not persuaded.

Katie Price’s arrival on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is a stunt motivated by the ego drive that comes with self-expression and self-manifestation for its own ends. Price set the trend and rewrote the wannabe handbook on how to succeed in the modern celebrity “have-a-go maelstrom”. Her self-importance can’t be restrained with niceties.

This latest PR endeavour illustrates that her addiction to column inches is now her greatest enemy. Obsessed with crushing her personal Satan – estranged hubby Peter Andre, who she met in the jungle the first time round – the exercise is surely going to go the same way as Jade Goody’s second, unpleasant experience in the Big Brother house. Can we ever forget Shilpagate?

If we take a moment to reflect, it is worth noting that we are all connected to the tarnished icon that is Jordan, addicted to the guilty pleasure of watching her antics. Her latest quest to relaunch her brand is, at the core, naïve. On the one hand, constant refreshment is at the heart of everything that has made her what she is, but on the other, it’s the core of everything that is rotten. It is a putrid masterpiece of strategy, to care so desperately for the opinion of those that don’t care.

By going into the jungle, she is begging her disciples to listen to her truth. Months of battling to win the hearts and minds of the great unwashed has failed, whilst her cuckolded other half, Andre, has been swept up into the coddling arms of the public, who see him as a victim of Katie Price’s machinations.

Jade Goody

There are notes of disgust registering around the country that she’s intending to let a film crew follow her through her final weeks as well as to her wedding, assuming it happens before she is too ill to cope. There shouldn’t be; this is a woman dying as she lived. She is, in many ways, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, in that all she knows is a life in front of the camera and all she can do to ensure the future for her children is to make as much money as quickly as possible for them in the only way she knows how; on television and in the press.

It’s telling that she has made it clear that she wants to ensure that her children are educated; this is the woman who came from difficult, uneducated beginnings to make a career in the celebrity industry, a woman who created a new life for herself on Big Brother and took on the personality the tabloids created for her, only to watch them turn on her with more vigour when she rose above the cheap insults that were initially levelled at her. She’s not the brightest of women but, tellingly, she knows it. And it’s her attempts to make amends for her mistakes that have endeared her to the British public. She is finally taking control of her life in the spotlight in a way that she wasn’t able to do when she first found herself in the arms of fame.

She is a most human celebrity and it is to be hoped, for the sake of her children, that she will be remembered for her late transmogrification into a role model; according to The Guardian, the swift and vicious spread of her cervical cancer – and her brutal, well-publicised honesty about it – is responsible for a massive upsurge of requests for smear tests. This alone drives home what people think about her. She is ‘one of us’, albeit ‘one of us’ who has become an industry in her own right. She is fallible but not above trying to make amends for her failings, even if that means doing so in excruciating detail in the public eye.

“There is a charge//For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/For the hearing of my heart…” wrote Sylvia Plath, again in Lady Lazarus. And: “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see//Them unwrap me hand and foot/The big strip tease.” Jade Goody has run with this idea and made a positive of it; where Plath was contemplating her attempts at suicide, the ‘big strip tease’ of Goody’s final weeks is solely about taking care of the future for her children and may well see her reborn in the public’s collective memory as someone who rose above the pain and despair and did some good.

Goody is not succumbing to Gwili Andre’s lonely and miserable mode of death, alone in her flat consumed by the fires taking root in her piles of cuttings. She has not allowed fame to make her bitter. She is taking what remains of her life and transforming it, seemingly aware that she, like so many celebrities before her, from Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana, will be frozen in the moment by her early death. Of course she’d prefer to live to see her children grow old rather than die in front of the cameras, but what she’s doing is right for her and what she thinks is right for her children.

If it disturbs you, do not watch or read the reports, but do not try to prevent Jade Goody from choosing the manner of her death; she has finally proved that she deserves more than that.