Pandora's box.

"I can't believe what's on the box at home," a Canadian expat television producer told me the other day. He had just returned from Calgary. "Tabloid TV! It's unbelie-e-e-e-vable. We're talkin' serious trash here, deep cheap, nuts 'n' sluts, y'know what I mean? It's so disgusting even I had to turn it off. And I work for CBC, right? Which means I think everything's okay. But man, things are out of control. I mean, where's all this going? Who's in charge? Next thing you know they'll be having some poor schmuck die for us LIVE on PBS."

Television isn't much better here, though British media types still mumble occasionally about moral standards and sociologists still search for a causal link between screen violence and violent behaviour.

Any attempt to establish an iron link between bad TV and bad behaviour is bound to fail, of course. They might as well be searching for incontrovertible proof of the existence of God; like fish swimming an ocean in search of water, the obvious will forever elude them. Their research will also lead them inevitably to the same old conclusion - that youths already prone to violence are likely to be incited to further violence by watching it on the box, while those less prone will not become violent as a result of being exposed to it. Then they'll go on Larry King again and blag on about how complex human beings are, and how the causes of delinquency, crime and generally awful behaviour are multiple and various. And how we must not prohibit certain kinds of artistic expression when they are but a strand in a larger rope of societal deprivation and psychopathology. And so on.

Meanwhile, as the blather rages on and the deluge of sleaze continues unchecked and unabated, the final bastions of Judeo-Christian morality and common decency are being swept away.

But don't take my word for it. Switch on your remote. Watch Sally Jessy Raphael tear apart the inadequate and the dysfunctional, exposing them to nightmarish confrontations and viewer contempt. When it's over, watch Sally stare into the camera, adjust her glasses and tell us with a straight face that it's good to get these things - child abuse, drugs, incest, whatever - into the open. In television culture, freedom of expression justifies the appalling video, emotional "health" the talk show.

Over on Channel 4, watch the heated debate going on between teachers and a Cardiff clergyman. "Children know nothing about God or Jesus Christ, and cannot recite the Lord's Prayer," laments Rev. Hywel Lewis. Grammar school teacher Geraldine Everette disagrees. Prayer is irrelevant, she says. "What children need today is more sex and drug education. Increasingly, youngsters are urged to move towards adult behaviour patterns well before they are emotionally or socially able to cope with such pressures or activities."

Now check out Channel 5 where there's an item about Gary Glitter, a British rock star charged with 50 counts of internet-related paedophilia, followed by new footage of the Jonesboro massacre in which two Arkansas boys blew away four classmates and their teacher. "Don't worry, it's fake," one pupil reportedly said to another as bodies fall all around them. "No, it's not, I'm shot," she replied before keeling over.

Next, flip to BBC and the announcement that after a corporate dark night of the soul, the broadcasting service has decided to show us a man as he actually dies. In defence of a series titled "The Human Body," Lord Winston, professor of Fertility Studies at Hammersmith Hospital, praises the BBC's "difficult" decision and insists that watching a man pop his clogs is high-class stuff. "Watching a film of this quality and delicacy is not voyeurism," he assures solemnly. Serious. Worthy. Bill Moyers, here we come. Tell me this isn't death as entertainment?

I am told there are still millions of people out there who hold "traditional" values, who continue to keep the commandments as they were taught. But, as a British research commission recently discovered, the broadcasting elite does not share their views. Nor does the younger generation brought up on soap operas, rented movies, television and computer culture. And why would they?

"Life's not like that anymore," says Labour MP Angela Eagle, who seems to think the death of shared values a good thing. "That's gone. If Lord Reith (stern moralist and founder of the BBC) were around today, everyone would think he was an appalling, patrician monster . . . I don't see how, in the diverse world we've got now, there's room for that kind of centralist patrician attitude."

There's plenty of room for rot, however. Rot masking as knowledge and belief. Oh, yes, the box has beliefs; the box even believes in God. It just doesn't believe in religion. "Television knows all about God because it behaves in exactly the same way as God," writes the Times television critic A. A. Gill. "It's omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless; it can work miracles and wake the dead, cure the sick, make happy endings, judge and punish. It answers prayers all day, every day. But it knows it's all a con trick, a sleight of hand, computer-enhanced, yet at the same time it believes its own tricks."

So there you have it! The box as New Age deity, a rival good to God's (good), wherein image is all and truth relative. Naturally, too, like any power, the box attacks its rival, God. How? By respectfully treating religious faith and experience as psychological aberration, naivete, stupidity and even fraud. And by subverting all moral values which uphold the goodness and dignity of man and supplanting them with illusion and false doctrines which always end in death.

And there we are, glued to the box, transfixed like moths to a flame - zapping from channel to channel, from website to website - blowing our minds, hardening our hearts, and amusing ourselves to death.

Beastly box!

Paula Adamick reports from England. Her column appears every other issue.