As children in the 1960s, having no television in the house, my sisters and I used to refer to looking out our bedroom window in the evening as "watching television", writes John Waters.
Mrs Lavin, who lived opposite, had her grandchildren come to visit in summertime, down from the North, and, before falling asleep, we would watch them having pillow fights "on television". We thought ourselves behind the times. But, watching Celebrity Farm last week, it occurred to me that we had been looking a half-century ahead, into the future of TV.
There are two licensed viewpoints about what is happening to television.
One is the tendency to bemoan the descent from Reithian responsibility into a hip emptiness; the other, to embrace that emptiness because it is "what people want".
There's a third way. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his beautiful 1988 essay, "The Zero Medium - Why All Complaints about Television are Pointless", noted television's movement towards what he called "the state of programmelessness".
In the beginning, he argued, a mistake had been made in imagining this new medium would provide a platform for existing media, like theatre, film, political speeches and news bulletins. As the desires of the viewing public became clearer, it was becoming evident that television was, in a very precise sense, finding itself - discovering its own essence, free of borrowed forms.
The most urgent ambition of television is to unburden itself of content, though not even programmes like Celebrity Farm have yet succeeded in this.
One of the extraordinary revelations of the reality TV genre is the fascination it has divined among the public for watching people move their private selves into the open. In its early generations, television provided a platform for various kinds of public acting, in which only "drama" offered glimpses of reality, and everything seemed back-to-front.
An actor in a TV play would simulate the behaviour of a real person, to the point of dissolving into an illusion of reality; but a politician, delivering a statement or opinion, though ostensibly real, would come across as an actor delivering lines.
Reality TV reverses this paradox, restoring television to the role of unfiltered window on the world.
It's early days yet, but the future is visible. At a fairly banal level, we watched Celebrity Farm last week and delighted in the disjunction between, for example, what those who were turfed off the farm were saying about their banishment and the body language they could not control.
At other levels, we were learning of what we seem to want from television, from life and from one another. By Monday night, I knew George would win. Something told me that the official spin about Twink being the first casualty - that viewers didn't understand they should vote for the person they least liked, rather than their favourite - was off the mark. It became clear that the winner would be the most childlike, innocent and silliest of the celebrities, and that was always down to a tussle between Gavin and George.
The moment that convinced me George would win was when he painted Tamara's nails, a perfect encapsulation of what the world would like men to be like.
I had a slight question-mark over Tamara until early Friday night, when I heard the psychologist praising her adult attitude, and instantly knew she was doomed.
I wouldn't be certain this is simply about young people texting in their responses. We live in a society craving youthfulness, exuberance and more benign forms of stupidity.
In the near future, the concept of Celebrity Farm will reveal itself as crude and rudimentary, because it will have opened a door on to something else, from where the true possibilities of television will become clearer. And soon thereafter, a half-hour of seeming banality may tell us more about what we are really like than 30 years of Late Lates.
It's pointless tearing our hair out. It is as ridiculous to attack Celebrity Farm for lacking substance and depth as to attack the Pope for being insufficiently Jewish. This may not just be the future of television, but the future of drama, life and everything. The insistence that television should educate, inform and entertain - in that or any other order - emerges as the truly banal aspect of this discussion. Broadcasters will continue to produce programmes of cultural, educational and informational excellence, for the edification of the public.
But, for all we will want to improve ourselves with worthy programmes and lofty thoughts, we will grow to hanker after an Ireland whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of romping celebrities, and fireside forums for the innocence of the ageless.