Indeed, some cynical readers of this argue that what restored Mill to emotional health was not so much crying over the death of someone else’s father as imagining the death of his own. By proxy, as it were, Mill kills the father whose austere system of education lay at the root of his depression. That father killed, all is well again.Read in this way, the idea of the father comprehends everything our age has come to abhor: authority, intellect, remoteness, the idea of an indispensable body of knowledge and achievement, objective truth, and belief in the improvability of our natures by education – a belief that is anathema to those attached to our natures just the way they are. Thus, by virtue of his being the child’s teacher, the father becomes the child’s enemy, blind to his emotions, forgetful of the maxim that man must be amused; in short, “distant, demanding, difficult, didactic” – and throw in sadistic to boot.A recent student test-paper asks: “What were some of the emotionally painful consequences of his father’s methods of instruction, according to Mill (eg instilling of fear and doubt rather than self-esteem)?” The dichotomy implied in this – self-esteem on the one hand, fear and doubt on the other – is telling.

Which is not to minimise the seriousness of Mill’s crisis.In his dejection, Mill turns to poetry; not Virgil or Ovid, but the English Romantics, Wordsworth in particular, who he believed helped to re-educate him into common feelings Wordsworth, notice, not Tolkien. Men must be amused, says the circus master in Hard Times, and broadcasters, who are themselves a species of circus master, have been overvaluing amusement ever since. The children in Hard Times also go to pieces, though in their case the offending father is a philistine without imagination But the association of the two books blurs that distinction. But what follows for the sentimentalist is something different Breakdown. What Mill himself calls “a crisis in my mental history”.”Aha!” says the sentimentalist: “See what happens when you expect too much of a child!” – as though no child who listened with mother ever suffered depression when he grew up. Whereupon Ken Barlow began to gush like a ninny about Irish rococo Rococo – the very pretentiousness of the word.

Of the two other characters in Coronation Street who occasionally consult a book, Norris Cole and Roy Cropper – one’s a prig and one’s a bore Both, like Ken Barlow, are pedants. And, again like Ken Barlow, both are sad.The other thing that Norris Cole, Roy Cropper and Ken Barlow have in common is age They are all old. Now, no one in television is going to be such a fool as to poke fun at the old, but there is a disproportionate favouring of youthfulness, whether that favouring shows itself in an increase in the number of babies everyone in the soaps now wants, or in the youth-associated vocabulary with which television executives like to lard their speeches “Bold over meek… Where other children were attending to the 19th-century equivalent of Listen With Mother, Mill was learning Greek and Latin (Greek when he was three, Latin not until the advanced age of eight), along with philosophy, history, mathematics, logic etc.What follows from this is vindication of James Mill’s belief that much more may be taught a child than is commonly thought, a vindication crowned by his son’s becoming a political thinker of immense distinction. If anyone were to write a history of English sentimentality, a key document in it would be John Stuart Mill’s autobiography – not in itself a sentimental work, but alongside Dickens’s Hard Times, routinely read sentimentally.Mill begins with a description of his education, administered in strict accordance with his father’s utilitarian principles, chief among which was the conviction that “much more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted”.

In that long, embittered letter of goodbye to the BBC and Tony Blair he wrote on television recently, Greg Dyke, ex-director general of the BBC, remembered the hope he had once entertained of New Labour. Among the qualities he particularly admired in Tony Blair was that he looked, and I quote, “as though he had been around Tesco”. Why this was a recommendation of such persuasiveness to Dyke, he neither said, nor felt he needed to say. Clearly, we would all agree that it humanised a prime minister not to be too fastidious in his choice of food and shopping ambience. Dyke measured his disillusionment with New Labour in the same terms.Tesco man – our new standard of authenticity, the noble savage of the high streets. Let’s put this idealisation of uneducatedness and unrefinement in context.

It should move from a remote, pedestal position of ‘lecturer’” – inverted commas – “to a ‘touch it, reach it, feel it guide’. It should enable people to to feel and experience the truth, not simply observe or ‘learn’ it.” All the educational clich?of the last century, wheeled out to take any suggestion of authority out of television. If the tutor becomes suspect, untutored must be best.What it seems to me the Panorama briefing document is tapping into is a new sentimentalisation of the noble savage – a creature that does not need to learn because it can touch and feel – only the savage in question is found not in the South Seas, but in front of our television sets.Or in Tesco Not my choice of defining store, but Greg Dyke’s. “To address this,” the document says, “Panorama should move from an image of distant informer to that of active agent. Alive over embalmed” was how Jane Root, ex-controller of BBC2, put the choice she saw her channel making.