I have very mixed feelings when I'm watching one of those frank and gritty documentaries about the people who get shat on by society - families coping with squalid housing or loan sharks or chronic unemployment.Am I someone with a social conscience, keeping in touch with what's happening outside my cosy middle-class cocoon? Or am I just a gawping voyeur, drinking in the sordid details of other people's miserable lives that I can do little to change?
I asked myself this when I was watching a particularly grim TV programme about tenants being conned and abused by ruthless landlords who let their homes disintegrate, jacked up the rent or evicted them overnight.
I wondered why I was continuing to watch a parade of humiliated and distraught people when I was already very familiar with the problems they were talking about, problems that have been going on for decades. What more would the programme tell me apart from how thoroughly wretched the victims were?
It's glaringly obvious that many people are struggling to survive and have decent lives. Why was I conspiring with journalists to make a pointless spectacle of their private anguish?
Apart from the voyeuristic element, there's the feeling of helplessness such programmes create. Naturally I want to relieve the suffering of these downtrodden people, but what can I actually do about it? As a solitary powerless individual, virtually nothing, so I'm left feeling inadequate and irrelevant in the face of overwhelming need.
Alternatively, I'm prompted yet again to rage against the incompetence of politicians who allow these injustices to go on year after year while they themselves enjoy decent lives in comfortable homes. And what does that rage achieve except to raise my blood pressure and remind me of other people's smugness? Nothing.
Is my ambivalence about these programmes just squeamish over-sensitivity? Or am I right to be dubious about such muck-raking journalism?
