But very relaxed.
Though the 1 per cent of wired-up people who have broadband access will see the stuff perfectly, the vast majority with dial-up modems might be puzzled by the occasional bump and wobble. Even when all the gizmos work, the picture is only about as big as a matchbox. With a general broadband take-up still three years away and full convergence further off than that, welcomestranger looks like a pretty small-time version of a broadcasting channel. But when we add another full-length television show next week, and so on through the weeks to come, something unusual will happen. The first show won’t go away, and neither will the second, the third or the nth.

Anything we put on the site, people will be able to watch any time, from any free country on earth. In cyberspace, there is no scheduling pressure, because there are no schedules. And that’s what makes the difference.In the course of about 30 years, network TV has made me well-off enough to put my retirement money into a stunt like this, and well-known enough to draw attention to it. So it would be churlish to complain about network television’s frustrating limitations. Though my literary friends are fond of sympathising with me for my supposed sufferings, I have greatly enjoyed the benefits of being a recognisable media face. But there are two big facts of life about network television that make it hard to put up with once you can see an alternative.One of the facts of life has always been there. The TV channels pay you all that money up front so that they can do exactly what they want with your work, including throw it away.

Earlier this year, when I published two books of essays, some of the critics kindly thought to pay me a compliment by saying that my written work showed how thoroughly I had been wasting my time on television I never thought that. As a writer-performer, I am very proud of some of the shows I made, especially the Postcard programmes about foreign cities. But those programmes cost a lot to make, so I didn’t own them.One of the reasons I went into independent TV production with the Watchmaker company was to get some control over the rights to those Postcard programmes Watchmaker was a successful company But I still never managed to get control of my work. The Postcard programmes were, and still are, shown all over the world except here. In Argentina last year you could see one or another of them screened six times every Friday, and this year three of them, suitably re-voiced, were screened back to back as the headline event of the Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic: some of the audience had seen them often enough to laugh in the right places even when the sound broke down.

But those shows are owned by the BBC and ITV, and if they decide never to screen them again in the country where they were manufactured, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. That was the bargain, so there’s no point bitching: on network television, they pay you not to complain if the best work you can do disappears from the screen straight after it is shown.The other fact of life about network TV was not there from the beginning, but by now looms too large to blink away. It’s the increasing likelihood that your best work will disappear from the screen before it is shown. The TV networks, ITV included, were essentially public service institutions until Mrs Thatcher removed the quality requirements from the ITV franchise bids. After that, ITV headed towards the widest possible audience at all times of night and day, with the BBC duly following because industry wisdom decreed that it had to maintain its share to justify the licence fee. Here again, good manners demand that I don’t bite the hand that fed me.

Though I have been quoted as saying that British TV has ruined itself by dumbing down, I never said so in public. In private I might have called some of the channel controllers demented, but I never thought they were stupid. Would that it were true.For a consistent, deliberate policy of dumbing down, the networks would have to appoint dumb executives. Alas, the current crop of executives are the reverse of dumb. They are so media-wise that they speak a language the old-style broadcasting grandees would scarcely understand.