Hopping channels late at night last week I caught bits of Channel 4's knives and guns season. The sight of a spooky-eyed Cherie Booth QC cross-examining various police and social workers (indistinct categories I know) had me scurrying off to bed. In today's Sunday Times, Adrian Gill hits the button when he writes: 'Everybody seemed to be doing something about alienated nihilistic youth last week, but none of the channels thought to mention their own responsibility for the behaviour of kids. They don't because they don't believe they are responsible....The contradiction of the box is that it leaps to take credit as a style leader and weather-maker....but it never wants to accept that there is a connection between television's power of suggestion and behaviour outside the box'. This raises a broader question about the relationship between the 'broken society' and the wider 'culture', which no politicians are prepared to broach, lest they land on the wrong side of progressive opinion, or risk forfeiting the talismanic 'yoof' vote. That is why the culture portfolios are occupied by low ranking politicians who see them as a chance for good seats at an Amy Winehouse concert, or whose conception of culture is narrowed to the matter of how we fund it. What a pity they don't give the job to Adrian Gill, except that he probably wouldn't want it.