We can gauge how low our political culture has sunk by the quality of our scandals. Claims for porn movies on expenses are a long, long way from Chappaquiddick or the Jeremy Thorpe trial. We all know that fiddling receipts is wrong, but what depresses us most is the crushing smallness of it, the sheer tawdriness.

What the current round of MP-bashing really demonstrates is that all passion has been spent. The political game no longer has consequences, the people in it are, by and large, of inferior quality and we likewise have been reduced to catching them out when they jump the ticket barrier. It's demeaning for everybody but surely most of all for journalists, who, like spooks longing nostalgically for the Cold War, must look back enviously to the days of Watergate and movies like All the President's Men and The Parallax View, which depicted them as investigators who were in way over their heads, but emerged as heroes.

Or maybe the journalists have changed, too. Certainly, Cal McAffrey, the veteran Washington reporter at the centre of the new political thriller State of Play, looks like a throwback. As played by Russell Crowe, he's paunchy, long-haired and unkempt. He drives a wreck of a car and his desk is a tsunami of books and clippings. He's also extremely likeable, macho in a countercultural kind of way and, most importantly, is serious about what he does. Younger viewers might well look at this character and be inspired to be a journalist.

How realistic a character Cal is, in an era when so many newsrooms look more like insurance company offices, is more doubtful.