THE GUARDIAN

Add a health warning, fine those who watch it, load on the taxes ...

The Guardian

Such connections are not confected or over-hyped. Rather the reverse. They are widely and recently researched, from California to New Zealand to Italy. Relevant and respected international medical bodies have issued clear guidelines which demand, for example, that no toddler under two should be exposed to the primary source of the problem.

Yet nanny stays mum. New Labour, like old Conservatism, doesn't even mumble a warning. The BBC is as bad as Rupert Murdoch at blowing, or even recognising, the gaff. Our free press goes walkabout. Our elected government - aware of real and current danger - not only permits ever more of the perilous product to go on sale, but makes it far cheaper - and free to pensioners - as addiction grows. It is, all things considered, a scandal of cowardly silence.

And Yes! Jeremy ... Yes! Ant and Dec and Huggy and Sophie ... it's you. The blight of the box. Watching too much television damages your health just as surely as puffing 40 a day or scoffing five kilos of hamburger. One damned, dim, flickering thing goes with another.

Take that New Zealand study published in the Lancet a few months ago. As child and adolescent television viewing time increased, so did obesity, unfitness, high cholesterol and smoking in adults. Direct correlations. The study concluded that 17% of overweight cases, 15% of raised cholesterol, 17% of smoking and 15% of non-fitness when we are grown can be put down to watching more than two hours of TV a day when we are young.

Girls - moving into other research - are particularly at risk as they hit their teens. Poor working-class girls fare worst of all. Eat fast food twice a week and watch television for more than 2.5 hours a day and the risk of diabetes triples. Premature puberty and attention deficit disorder problems are equally well charted. The advice of the American Academy of Paediatrics couldn't be more explicit: keep under-two's away from TV entirely, and allow older children no more than an average of 1.5 hours of screen time a day.

And this isn't wholly a matter of sedentary lifestyles and junk food and junk TV going together, a Royle Family existence in which television is the mere prop for couch potatoes everywhere. Six hours of Panorama will do just as much harm as six hours of Pokemon; 24-hour cable news leads straight to an early grave. Have you noticed how channel choice and obesity mushroom together? QED. Quite easily deceased.

But where, pray, are the government campaigns and awful warnings of NHS distress to come about all this? Where are the outspoken Channel 4 documentaries and ministers pulverised by an incensed John Humphrys? Why does any prospective policy switch concentrate on more exercise at school and forget sofa slumping at home? Have we given up on parents getting a grip?

A modest proposal (one Jonathan Swift would probably have found rather too modest) fits neatly enough with nanny's other prescriptions for pizzas, chocolate biscuits, fizzy drinks and fags.

Begin, as usual, with education. At every programme break, add a mandatory warning. Have you been watching for more than 90 minutes? Switch off and do something healthy. Is your toddler peeking at Cbeebies again? Switch off and get out the push chair or toy box. Be active, not passive. Don't lie in bed with a Scooby-Doo pacifier. Get up and get going.

Too feeble to break the spell of the Fimbles? Perhaps the red button on your digital TV could start flashing like a traffic light after 90 minutes. Then the set could automatically turn itself off after two hours. Then a BBC detector van could pursue and fine persistent offenders, the junkies of junk.

Television is too cheap, not too expensive. Treat it like a packet of Senior Service or a pint of bitter. Load on the taxes; take a load off the health service. And, since this is a wholly controlled medium, control it by reducing hours of transmission, banning particularly toxic channels, making an example of Fox Kids as well as Fox News. If you've got Ofcom already, then Turn-Ofcom is only a switch flick away.

Ah! I can see that you think I've gone much too far. There are addictions and addictions, aren't there? There are forces - from Hollywood to Shepherd's Bush - that make Big Mac seem small and puny. No voluntary restraints can turn this tide. No mandatory clamps can free us from screen subservience. How tasteless even to mention the subject as Christmas approaches. Some things are grosser than any of us.

Which is, of course, true. Videos bust a few blocks and turn into DVDs. Slim Game Boys become bloated old boys. Your terminal may indeed be terminal. There is nothing we can do, or hope to do. Even raising the problem is a witter too far, the impossible in search of the incredible. Nanny knows best; and nanny is watching the Simpsons again.

p.preston@guardian.co.uk