This week, Freeview has had one of its occasional retuning events. As new channels come and old channels go, the channel list becomes increasingly messy until the point where the powers-that-be decide enough is enough and it’s time to bring some organisation to it.

This sort of thing is a necessary evil of the digital era. But I feel sorry for those, particularly older, people who are used to setting up their television once when they buy it, then making do with two and a half channels for the rest of their lives.

A couple of weeks ago in the first episode of The Pod Delusion, James O’Malley spoke about the bonkers-sounding Conspiracy Channel. Sadly, I do not have Sky, so have been unable to sample its delights for myself. I must rely on humble Freeview for my post analogue switch-off telly fix.

Freeview brings a wealth of choice that simply did not exist on analogue terrestrial television. That is of course a good thing, and I personally cannot imagine going back to making do with the five analogue channels. But there is an element of truth to that Fry & Laurie sketch, where a dining Government minister is dumped on by the waiter with a “choice” of cutlery which turns out to be countless plastic coffee stirrers.

At the same time as this week’s big retune, the long-awaited launch of Quest, the new channel from Discovery, has taken place. Its original launch had already been long delayed and finally aborted at the last minute several months ago.

While a channel that promises something resembling quality struggled to get off the ground, there has been no shortage of utter crud getting airtime on Freeview. In fact, I struggled to think of any half-decent channels that had launched recently. So I decided to look it up, and see what changes had been made to Freeview over the previous year.

• 10 September — Smile TV 2 (a mucky Babestation-style channel; closed on 19 March)
• January — Rocks & Co (shopping channel)
• 8 January — SuperCasino (roulette channel)
• 8 January — NetPlay TV (broadcasting shopping programmes or infomercials)
• 15 January — CNN International — 4 hours per day
• 22 January — Dave+1
• 2 February — Russia Today — 2 hours per day
• 3 February — DirectGov (text service)
• 12 March — Partyland
• 1 April — Gems TV — 5 hours per day
• 5 April — CNN increases hours to 7 hours per day, 2 hours of which is SuperCasino
• 1 May — Gems TV closed down
• 13 May — Smile TV 2 relaunched — 5 hours per day
• 14 May — Quest — 14 hours per day — launch aborted!
• 20 May — Virgin 1 goes 24 hours per day
• 20 May — Virgin 1+1 — 12 hours per day
• 23 May — Film4 extends hours
• 1 July — Create & Craft (shopping channel) launches — 5 hours per day
• 4 July — Russia Today gets second slot — 2 hours per day
• 15 July — Big Deal (quiz channel) launches — 7 hours per day
• 27 August — Price-drop tv returns
• 27 August — Smile TV 3
• 27 August — Babestation
• 30 September — Quest launched

So a couple of channels — Film4 and Virgin 1 — have extended their hours. A couple of news channels have been able to find scraps of space here and there. I say news channels, though in the case of Russia Today, propaganda may be a more accurate description. These channels broadcast at quite obscure hours. It is certainly an interesting spin on the concept of “24 hour news”.

Beyond that, the vast majority of new Freeview channels are pure trash. There are two new “+1″ channels, replaying exactly what was broadcast on a channel an hour ago. By my reckoning, there are now at least five such channels on Freeview, which doesn’t seem like the best use of limited bandwidth.

Beyond that, there is a collection of shopping channels, gambling channels, quiz channels and adult channels. Frankly, this is the sort of stuff you expect at the arse end of the darkest nooks of the Sky EPG. I am not quite sure this is what they had in mind when the digital revolution was promised.

The Babestation channels have long been a fixture on Sky. But their presence on Freeview is relatively novel. They are interesting for the fact that it hasn’t taken long for four of them to crop up. It is surprising because their appeal seems rather limited to me.

If you have never seen it (er, not that I’m an expert, of course), basically the format is quite simple. A few glamour models who couldn’t present their way out of a paper bag sit on a couch trying to encourage people to phone in for a mucky chit-chat.

Once someone with more money than sense takes the bait, the microphone is switched off, and some cheap-sounding music is turned up. The women proceeds to talk dirty on the phone — without the viewer being able to hear a word. They sort of wriggle around on the couch in a way that I assume is supposed to look sexy, but it really just makes them look vaguely like they need the toilet.

In short, it is the modern-day equivalent of the dodgy services advertised on business cards left in piss-stained telephone boxes, only with the beady eye of Ofcom overseeing proceedings. There is nothing extreme in the slightest about these channels. You wonder what goes through the mind of people who would sooner pay through the nose to sample such services when you could quite easily find more enticing free porn on the internet.

Up until this week’s retune, the positioning of one of these channels — Partyland — in the channel list was certainly interesting. It was channel number 50, but with no channels occupying numbers 51-69, the next channel up was CBBC. Even though the broadcasting hours do not clash, I can imagine plenty of children just pressing the down button on their remote and coming across a strange new channel promising a party land. It certainly would provide a more eye-popping rite of passage than accidentally stumbling across the frilly knickers section of the Argos catalogue.

It remains to be seen whether these channels remain a long-term fixture on the Freeview platform. One trashy genre which sadly appears to have stood the test of time is quiz channels. These late-night televisual travesties are hypnotically awful. A slightly desperate presenter will appear to engage you in a stare-out competition while goading you into answering questions with non-existent answers.

Even though they still live on, such quiz channels are not quite as prevalent as they used to be. They were a major victim of the collapse in trust that broadcasters faced a couple of years ago. Into the vacuum came the gambling channels.

It’s noted that this sort of programming tends to be on late at night, especially at the weekend. In other words, they are aimed squarely at the post-pub market.

The morals are pretty dubious. The clear idea is to target people whose judgement has been impaired by their alcoholic consumption, goading people into phoning premium rate phone lines when they perhaps shouldn’t. In the case of the gambling channels, it could be said that they intend to capture a particular section of the population that may have problems with addiction.

This is not quite the vision of digital television that was sold to the public. It is funny how most of the extra “choice” that has been brought into our living rooms revolves around extracting large amounts of cash from our wallets.

I don’t think Emil Kacic is ugliest man in the world. He is certainly not as ugly as some of the people of Newcastle. But is Emil Kacic the least self-aware man in the world? The most socially inept man in the world? Possibly.

I found another story with a bit more information (warning: contains some NSFW images). My Romanian is not too hot, but I reckon it says he has been looking for 30 years. This means that the average length of time he has known each woman before proposing is 2.19 days. No wonder he is getting rejected!

I’ve got to the point where I have even been asking women I am meeting in the streets to marry me, but they always say no.

What a shock! You know, I think if a stranger came up to me and asked me to marry them, I might do a bit more than just say no.

The thing is that when somebody proposes in this manner they are sending a whole variety of signals. He is desperate and rude. The fact that he is 49 years old and has still never married, despite clearly wishing he had, itself provides enough information to anyone who has the question popped in their face. Emil Kacic is a lemon.

It reminded me of another example of somebody approaching relationships in a controversial way. This also hit the internet big time a couple of months back. The “spectacularly beautiful” woman who placed an ad on Craigslist outlining her exasperation that she was failing to date anyone who earned more than $250,000. (Yeah, my heart bleeds.)

The most incredible bit of her ad is the paragraph where she points out that some rich people marry — gasp — plain-looking women!

Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the Upper East Side so plain? I’ve seen really “plain Jane” boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the East Village. What’s the story there?

Both the gold-digging Craigslist advertiser and Emil Kacic are making the same mistake. Both assume that looks alone are good enough. Mr Kacic reckoned that, as long as he was not abnormally ugly, all he would need to do was ask enough people and he would eventually marry. The Craigslist gold-digger (not a nice name, I know, but I don’t have her real name so it will have to do) also implies that the only possible justifiable reason why a man would want to marry someone would be if they were good looking.

For sure, looks must count to a degree. You would be lying if you said otherwise. But it could never be the sole factor, or even the main factor, when making the decision to marry. The reason comes from one of the respondents on Craigslist:

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party, and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub — your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity … in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset…

In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following: if my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

What I find interesting is something that is kind of skirted around by most people. What the Craigslist gold-digger is doing is little more than a subtle form of prostitution. Yet while the Craigslist gold-digger might attract a few eye-rolls and tsk-tsks, you won’t find her being fined or thrown in the slammer.

In this sense, masses of people sell sex. Countless relationships along the lines of what the Craigslist gold-digger was seeking must be forged. How about also actors who film sex scenes, models, those people on Babestation-style programmes, Page 3 girls, strippers, porn stars, brothel workers, street prostitutes?

My guess would be that many people find some of the activities at the end of that list more unacceptable, but some at the beginning of the list relatively innocuous. But they are all essentially activities that involve people selling their bodies for money.

Perhaps the biggest difference with the later items in the list (besides the case of street prostitution, which happens in a public place and with women in a particularly vulnerable situation) is the socio-economic status of the people involved. Is there a bit of snobbery that comes into play?

It strikes me that selling sex, in its various forms, is a reality of life. And since prostitutes are in an especially dangerous position I would have thought it would be wiser to be trying to help them more rather than increasingly criminalising (and thereby making even more dangerous) their particular brand of this common activity. In a sense, they are being penalised for calling a spade a spade.

Somehow, ITV manage to find up to a dozen people who are shameless enough to sit in a studio with laptops connecting them up to anybody who wants to phone or text them up. For £1 per go, naturally.

As you would expect on a dating show, the participants probably haven’t scored in an age and are fairly desperate. I guess you would have to be prepared to appear on national television basically saying, “I can’t get a partner any other way than by advertising this very fact on television.”

Most of them are your typical socially awkward types. Some of them are just all-out dickwads though. One ‘DJ’ who appeared on the programme seemed to genuinely think he was Goldie. He had more chains than he had teeth. He actually used ‘Bo!’ as a greeting without a hint of irony.

These people obviously never get any callers. They often cite “technical problems”. Yeah right. Something tells me the socially awkward one who’s hiding behind his hair has no problems working his computer at home.

And then sitting centre stage is the attractive young woman who has received twenty calls in the past hour. Some of the callers have gone “a bit too far” apparently. Yuk! ITV, do you see what you have done?!

This might not be at the level of Party People or the various other babestation channels which basically consist of dirty men asking for extreme closeups of the girls’ feet. But at least those channels don’t pretend otherwise. ITV Playdate acts as though it’s a classy programme, but it is not.

Now phucker has alerted us to the contents of the ITV Playdate website. And this is where the last remaining vestiges of good taste are thrown out of the top floor window, kicked around, stamped on, shat on and something elsed on that I really don’t want to say!

Presenter Brendan Courtney is aged “22 (and a bit … and the bit is my own business)”. That’s a joke already. The bit looks as though it’s at least twenty. But just wait until you see what he lists as his favourite scent.

Favourite scent: Old Spice, Bukkake.

What the fuck?! Bukkake?!? Does he even know what it is? Which wise guy at ITV thought that it would be okay to put this on the website? Aaargh!