Yesterday a story in the paper asked ‘Where did all the great movies go?’

The gist of the article was that twenty years ago you could see lots of worthy, classic films on terrestrial TV channels, but now they pander more to the lowest common denominator. Something like that anyway.

I can see what the writer was getting at, but I think it is not so much that the films were available back then, but that they were almost unavoidable. Back then we did not have the distractions of the Internet and multi-channel satellite or cable TV. Even video recorders were not everywhere. We had rudimentary video consoles and home computers, but many households only had the one TV. Many households then were limited to one TV set, with a choice of four channels, and they tended to all pack up around midnight.

Imagine: a couple are settling down to watch some television and have to find something neither objects to completely as there is no option for one to go and watch another channel in the next room. One channel has a Money Programme special on the gold standard, another has a creaky costume drama, the third has a repeat of a programme you didn’t enjoy much last time around and the last has a film. Not a film you would ever have chosen to watch maybe, but still a film.

As a result they might end up being forced to watch a well-made, thought-provoking piece of art, and realise that just because a film is in black and white or has subtitles or both does not necessarily mean it is dull.

It is true that the terrestrial channels took more care with scheduling, putting together a season of films by one director or on a particular topic, sometimes digging out an interview or documentary to put alongside it, but I still think that the difference was that a larger part of the audience were watching merely because there was no other choice.

Decent films are still shown, and are themed in seasons, but a lot of that now happens on some of the other few hundred channels available and we either don’t realise they are on or we get tempted away by more lightweight offerings.

The thing is, even though I studied film formally, and have enjoyed lots of ‘serious’ films and know that a foreign language film can be every bit as good, entertaining and funny as a Hollywood film, and even though at age 16 my favourite director was Antonioni, I still make a mental connection between serious film and hard work. The result is that I watch fewer arty films, but watch them by choice.

Having said that, when I do make that choice it is largely because the restrictions twenty years ago forced me to get into that habit. I can remember when one channel had a Bunuel season. Like most people my knowledge of Bunuel was limited to the short films he did with Dali and to Belle de Jour, but BBC (or Channel 4) had me watching Los Olvidados and being a better person for it. When they had a Louis Malle season I ended up watching all of them.

The only downside of all that is the deja vu feeling which comes when Hollywood eventually remake all the better ones, coupled with the disgust when they totally ruin them – I am thinking especially of the cowardly remake of Trois Hommes et Une Coufin as Three Men and a Baby. I am sure the American version of Taxi would bring on a terminal case of tutting and send me back to the original film on DVD.

So, that early enforced exposure to non-mainstream films made me realise that the Icicle Thieves, for example, is every bit as good as anything made here or in the US, and led me to hunt out films like Delicatessen, the Idiots, or Amelie in recent years.

Crucially, the availability of non-mainstream films and foreign films is now better than it ever was with the advent of DVD combined with Internet stores, but you do wonder how a new generation will get the taste for them if they can’t get the forced introduction which we had before the explosion of entertainment media.

It may be a bit unfair to accuse the terrestrial channels of not providing variety though. When our floors were being done and we had to move out for a couple of weeks we only had a TV in the courtesy house: no cable, no Internet, no second (or third) sets. During that time we watched Das Experiment which, to be honest, we would probably not have done at home. It was almost a life-changing experience watching that film. So it is not that the material is not there, it is that there are too many ‘easier’ choices.

And that is what it boils down to. This modern idea of choice: parental choice, patients’ choice, its all choice now but sometimes that allows the chooser to make the wrong choice and bypass what the experts might have chosen for him. It is the difference between getting what we want and getting what is better for us, and the root of a lot of modern political and social dilemmas: it is the difference between a ‘nanny state’ at one extreme and having the influence of experts diluted or negated at the other.

The irony is that for all the apparent variety on offer now with multi-channel TV it seems to boil down to an endless supply of Two Pints Of Lager, Top Gear and cookery shows.