With forensic thoroughness and a certain dry relish, Fitzwalter itemises the destruction wrought by Robinson’s single-minded pursuit of “shareholder value”. (Fitzwalter himself was one of its first victims.) Robinson and his sidekick Charles Allen laid waste to Granada’s commitment and ability to produce quality programmes. They then did the same to the whole ITV network, when Granada merged with Carlton – which, under Michael Green, ceased to produce any programmes at all once it won the franchise from Thames TV to become the “new” ITV.

In the long term, Robinson and Allen’s slash-and-burn policies did not even succeed in increasing shareholder value, let alone maintaining it. ITV shares today are at a pitiful 40p, a third of their value two years ago. Its average audience is less than one third of what it had been a decade ago: neither the BBC nor Channel 4 have experienced that kind of decline. Long before ITV's share price had collapsed, Robinson and Allen were both gone, each of them several million pounds richer. Fitzwalter points out that in 1990, when the Granada Group had a turnover of £1.3bn, the highest-paid director received £200,000. In 2006, Charles Allen ran Granada Media, which had a £1.3bn turnover – but Allen’s salary, not including pension and share options, was £1m, or four and half times larger.

Companies can survive change and takeovers. What they cannot survive is the destruction of the ethos which has sustained them. What happened at Granada, and then across the rest of ITV, is that the ethos of making quality programmes was lost. Robinson and Allen did not believe in it: they set out to destroy it, and they succeeded. They thought the old ethos was wasteful and pointless, a way in which pretentious and boring journalists and producers could justify spending other people’s money. It is not even clear that Robinson and Allen, in their most brutally destructive phase, were willing to recognise that there is a difference between The Jewel in the Crown and, say, Footballers’ Wives, or between World in Action at its best and The Jerry Springer Show at its worst. The distinction between quality and dross playedno part whatever in their calculations or their business strategy.

Does it matter? To those who think there is no difference at all between quality and dross as far as television programmes go – to those who think they are all dross – it does not matter. That, however, is a symptom of a chronic loss of confidence in basic values which leads to the destruction of standards in any area of culture, be it education, art or television. There clearly is a difference in quality between what ITV is now doing, and what it was doing 20 years ago. A refusal to recognise the falling-off in quality requires a dogmatic attachment to the relativist view that all judgments of aesthetic value are phoney, and the only measure of worth is money. That dogma, however, is worse than a crime: it is a mistake. As the decline in the stock of ITV shows, if money is literally all you care about, you make yourself incapable of making anything striking and original which people will flock to watch.