BBC2 weekend morning schedule-filler Sunday Past Times is one of the latest and more interesting variations on the format, each episode organised around a topic, such as home, school etc, as represented on television in years gone by. It benefits from an absence of talking heads (apart from that of “bubbly” presenter Nadia Sawalha), and from its selection of more obscure archive documentary clips. The reporters holding muffler microphones and lab-coated scientists pulling levers reinforce suspicions that the past was in fact a dreamy realm of thick-rimmed glasses and beards, wonky graphics and computers the size of Huddersfield.

The show entered a particularly mad area this week as the theme was “the future” as represented by the TV of the past, summoning various vintage clips from Tomorrow’s World, an apparently serious feature on how to communicate with inhabitants of UFOs, and the obligatory weirdly/disconcertingly accurate/blasé American expert of the 1960s, chucking out casual comments about climate change and eugenics like he was taking in some shooting practice on the local firing range. Most bizarre was a montage of period pieces speculating about how television itself might evolve in the future. Predictions of TV shopping and instant voting were duly replayed, and there was a pretend 21st century newscast circa the early 1970s, hosted by two utopian beings in synthetic costumes. This came complete with interactive elements (a subtitle reads “for more information, see Channel C8″; the equivalent of the red button), and a studio background and sound-effects remarkably close to the style of Look Around You. Even if television never reached this minimalist intensity in reality, one can’t help wondering whether fictional texts such as this helped inspire the parody.

Following 1951′s Festival of Britain, with its optimistic transformations of domestic space, and then energised by NASA’s outer-space pursuits, television celebrated the modernist era of scientific progress of which its own development was an inseparable part. But sheer accumulation of material and multi-channel commercialisation has inevitably led the medium to collapse in on itself. Dulled by over-familiarity, and with its innovative thunder stolen by the internet, television has become a postmodern mélange of retro-chic, garish interactivity and dissolution of the real/fiction boundary. TV has gone from the strident linearity of the M1 to the terminal circularity of the M25. The archive-resurrected US futurologist put his trigger-finger on this when he reminded his audience that “progress” and “the future” were not the same, but rather two distinct lines of thought (perhaps a more radical idea in the 1960s than today). Television now suggests the idea of the future as vacuum, with nostalgia series in years to come consisting of nothing beyond past compilations, countdowns and reminisci-packages. “Remember 2005? That was the year of all those great compilations from the ’80s … and The All-Time Greatest Soap Murders, and Britain’s Greatest Bridges … now let’s take a trip back to those heady days” etc.

Is there another reason, beyond the obvious economics of recycling, why the future has been abandoned as a positive destination for TV entertainment? Significantly, Tomorrow’s World ended in 2002, viewers deeming it obsolete, its cosy everyday vision of self-cleaning suits and intelligent saucepans all used up. But it is not quite accurate to say that television is no longer interested in the future; in fact over the last 20 years or so it has changed trajectory, from a utopian dream of domestic bliss to a dark dystopia, taking in environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, global terrorism and mass social breakdown.

Look Around You ridicules the past optimism of popular science, and it could be argued that all the current retro-compilations and pastiches are in fact a flight into the past, an escape not only from the real anxieties of the present but from possible future horrors. Such fearful scenarios and moral dilemmas are depicted in epic, blockbusting terms, as in the BBC’s If … series (for instance, “If … The Toxic Timebomb Goes Off”, “If … TV Goes Down the Tube”, or, more ambiguously, “If … Drugs Were Legal”), the Supervolcano disaster simulation, and 2003′s The Day Britain Stopped, a speculative drama which imagined the calamitous after-effects of a transport seizure.

The BBC’s 1984 TV film Threads, imagining the consequences of a nuclear attack upon a British city, could be seen as the detonator of this new mutant genre, a product of a culture irradiated by fear and doubt. The realisation that the environment is being destroyed by pollution may also have been a major factor, as this has (rightly) become a mainstream pre-occupation in everything from current affairs to kids’ TV. And, as mentioned above, technology has enabled many seismic events to be projected in advance (although predictions of a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast did not prevent the US government being taken by surprise). News channels have the means to broadcast instantly from disaster zones across the world, bringing future fears closer to home (“This could happen to us”).

Here is the narrative change: instead of infinite freedom we are presented with eternal gridlock, and effortless manipulation of our surroundings has been replaced by powerlessness in the face of (industrial/natural/political) “forces beyond our control”. Post-[insert terror date here] it is no longer safe for interviewers to ask schoolkids about the future and elicit quirky and precocious answers (as in the clips dredged up by Sunday Past Times); the future is no longer a playful space, but an incident room reserved for disaster technicians and emergency planning groups (and, again, when real life consultants appear on “documentaries” about events which have not yet happened, the difference between reality and fiction becomes blurred).

Being bombarded by TV images of campaigns to “liberate” by annihilation and terrorism, we are reminded that we could be vaporised at any moment, like unfortunate contestants randomly exterminated in a Dalek-run game show. An entire city might be wiped away as easily as a tea-stain on a Formica table; there might be no future at all. The ultimate TV future-shock assignment is coverage of humanity’s own apocalypse: getting the best angle on the story, convening the panel of experts, tracking the countdown to the meteor’s impact. But imagine all the build-up without an audience to enjoy the spectacle – where’s the satisfaction in that?

So television’s ongoing history of things to come has been subjected to a drastic rewrite, its bright dream of automated domesticity dimming to a global nightmare. It’s no wonder, then, that we take refuge in retro-spoofs and quaint compilations. Who would have imagined, way back in the past, that such ephemeral material would eventually form the bulk of our psychic barricade against the future?

The news desk was once the primary signifier of television current affairs, a rigid patriarchal barrier emanating stasis and control, as well as implying the parallel unseen phantasy world of the newsreader’s repressed below-the-waist existence.

But from the first Channel 5 transmissions back in 1997, the move from rear to front of Formica represented a paradigm shift in tabloid TV news presentation. In a pose of studied informality the newscaster leant a buttock upon the lip of the console, knee calibrated at the designated angle and script held adroitly over her midriff as she summarised the latest terrorist attack or political scandal.

This could be read as an effort to make the news more accessible, as if to say to the passing viewer, “we won’t let this piece of old furniture come between you and the stories that matter.” There is also the possibility that the calculated visibility of Kirsty Young’s immaculately trousered figure might make the news especially “accessible” to a certain sort of middle-aged male viewer whose finger might otherwise be poised on the five button of the remote control slightly later in the evening.

This is not to cast aspersions on Ms Young, whose journalistic delivery is far more measured and authoritative than, for example, the noddingly sentimental Trevor McDonald, or the bumbling Peter Sissons; and it must be noted that five’s stand-up news routine has since been copied by its rivals, who have been compelled to display their own bodies, of both genders, to increased dramatic effect.

The ITV Evening News beams its presenters into CGI environments resembling a high-tech theatre of Shock and Awe; but they still insert themselves behind a mirrored slab at intervals, demonstrating a self-reflexive tension between anchorage and mobility. Even the more grown-up Channel Four News (like ITV, an ITN production) utilises the walkabout and cinematic “stand and pan” styles in its introductions and trailers, generating an up-to-the-minute, news-in-action mise-en-scene for the dynamic Jon Snow (still more tranquil than his cousin Peter, a pioneer of physical newscasting whose machine gun enunciation and gestural excess made him appear, even from behind the desk, to act out the very energy of news itself). Only the BBC apparently feel obliged to uphold the symbolic order by keeping its newsreaders bolted down behind their public service workstations.

Possibly in an attempt to neutralise the emotional side-effects of the news, the newsreader is drifting ever further into a transitional non-place. S/he might sometimes be positioned in the vague vicinity of a panel, as if the production team wished to be free from this official prop but were contractually obliged to keep it in shot; and in a recent Five News update I noticed that the desk-space had been dispensed with entirely, Young standing in what appeared to be a Perspex alcove between floors, as if she had not quite made it downstairs in time for the bulletin.

Presumably this is part of the channel’s ongoing (and now Sky-produced) project to make “news on the move” for what it imagines to be its multi-tasking target audience. By moving the broadcaster into ever more obscure corners of the studio perhaps they aim to open the viewer’s mind to hitherto hidden perspectives on the events of the day.

One wonders how far this displacement can go; will the presenter soon be reading the autocue from the office corridor or the studio car park? The result, of course, is that the news itself will seem ever more ephemeral, like some sort of impromptu corporate catch-up between cappuccinos. And finally, as anticipated by the transparent architecture of the postmodern news studio, will the future viewer really “see” any news at all?

Celebrity is a strangely-shaped biscuit whichever way you dunk it. I have found myself cringing at the screen twice lately, once in horror and once in delight, and both times guiltily. Let’s clean up the crap first. Paparazzi (Wednesday 05/01/05, BBC1) is a fly-on-the-turd documentary following the Big Pictures celebrity picture agency, in which sad (mostly) men with telephoto penises scramble and grunt over each other towards the climax of the latest Charlotte Church leaves-pub-after-having-a-drink-or-two exclusive and similar dismal missions.

I have no objection to the premiere/awards/generic-celeb-photo-opportunity assignments. However, there is something sinister as well as tragic about a couple of blokes sitting together in silence in a Ford Focus outside a hotel for hours on end in the hope that they might get a sight of a teenager going to her 18th birthday party (they didn’t). Obviously I have no time for Ms Church or her career, but regardless of her media whoreage even she does not deserve to be stalked by some raincoated fiddler trying to poke his lens up her frock, anymore than a checkout girl should have to put up with a stranger waiting outside Kwik Save at closing time to leer at her. Famous or not, it amounts to the same thing.

As for the man behind the Big Pictures operation, he has progressed from award-winning photo-journalism in the Bosnian war-zone to directing his own empire of showbiz spume. He seems to regard the bodies of famous people as his property, ordering his team to sniff around hotels and family homes, or flash through car windows outside nightclubs in an effort to catch some soap star or pop singer in their anorak or knickers, for the benefit of whatever magazine will pay out. The paparazzi are the oil in the celebrity machine. It all adds up to posh nosh and cheap thrills for Mr Big Picture (clearly a wannabe celeb himself), who presides on his office throne playing with his random cleavage generator, as supplied by the dribbling gang of ex-decorators and lorry drivers who make up his arse-crack squad of photographers.

But why go out looking for celebrities to humiliate when sooner or later they will do it for themselves? Watching an ex-royal servant squirm and chew insects on television is a money-shot beyond any paparazzo’s zoom lens. And so I have to confess to a fair amount of anticipatory pleasure waiting to see which creatures had been dredged up from the murky showbiz canal for the new Celebrity Big Brother. The in(s)ane juxtapositions, the sheer stage-managedness of the whole thing is pure disposable “kitsch and sink” drama. The first night is invariably the best as the trash talent is lovingly unveiled. It’s all downhill from there.

As the desperate cohort stepped onto the ramp I failed to recognise half of them; maybe the programme-makers had to shove some of their own researchers in to make up the numbers and hoped no-one would notice. (The celeb and non-celeb reality shows will finally coalesce into one glutinous mass – it will be a fitting end for such a fleshy genre.) However, there were a couple of jewels in the mud. Germaine Greer is that rare species, an intellectual and an icon. Big Brother is in a sense her natural habitat, a kind of pornographic cultural studies seminar to which she should add some much needed academic rigor.

And then there is Bez. Yes, that’s Bez. Bez …? Jesus Christ, it’s Bez! Sorry, my mind is still trying to assimilate this information. What a trip it must have been, from Happy Mondays’ hallucinogenic freaky dancing mascot to a life of anonymity wandering the moors befriending trapped sheep and living next door to Shaun Ryder (a couple of hopeless illiterate romantics, a kind of hash-smoking Coleridge and Wordsworth), and then into the balmy end-of-the-pier world of Celebrity Big Brother with its surreal repository of models, boy band singers and Brigitte “Tree” Nielsen.

What’s going on? I trust Bez and Grez to make sense of it all between them. Rave on, sorted, emancipation, etc.

Spoken clips are mixed with a collection of images – mostly from the present, occasionally the past – illustrating the stories being told; a dream sequence of bedsits, streets, faces, tower blocks, dressing tables, wallpaper, books, dolls, nightclubs and countless other details flow past. Morley herself is mostly offscreen, making only fleeting appearances, for instance walking through streets or glimpsed in home-movie footage or photos. While fragments of her self are scattered across the film, her presence, reflected in the abrasive words of others and the elegiac visual style, saturates every frame.

The result loosens the notions of documentary, memory and autobiography by drawing attention to conflicts and unreliabilities, rather than concealing them. Questions are left unanswered, stories unfinished; the director does not verify or discount anything said about her by her interviewees. The pattern suits the hazy visual collages, which evoke the years of intoxicated wandering; the edges between past and present are blurred. An atmospheric soundtrack (including music performed by Vini Reilly, one of those interviewed) completes the effect.

The film is an effective portrayal of a “predatory female”asserting her sexuality in a way which at that time was commonly thought to be restricted to men; it is also, up to a point, nostalgic for a network of youthful friendships that encircled a certain irrecoverable place and time. However, the greatest strength of the film lies in its unusual self-consciousness, specifically its readiness to deal with its own egocentrism, by displaying the tensions between Morley and those she interviews. Former partners and friends openly question her motivations and confront her with the self-centred nature of the film: “In a way this film is a kind of mythology of you and your life.”… “Really the whole thing’s about you, so why don’t you just sit in front of the camera and say what you want to say?”… “What are you trying to prove here? What bad person were you?”

The memories are impressionistic, occasionally contradictory, and often very funny, with an edge of sadness or risk. A friend remembers first seeing her sitting under a table in the Hacienda playing with a train set: “I thought you were probably retarded.” Morley spontaneously asks Pete Shelley to marry her; he agrees but then she doesn’t bother to turn up at the registry office. The film portrays an apparently compulsive sexual career, for which alcohol was the lubricant. Most of the stories, therefore, are about sex, in one way or another: the dimensions of her tongue are legendary among male acquaintances (here the director provides a close-up demonstration – her longest time on screen in the entire film); one day she opens the door to the gasman and fucks him on the cooker; while visiting London, she and a friend offer a male stranger some dubious service for money. The soundtrack voice ironically sings, “… just a girl who can’t say no”. Lost in depression, on the verge of prostitution, her life is heading for the wrong sort of climax.

The truth of these sleazy anecdotes is buried in their mythic re-telling, in the film as in daily conversation. Morley’s life itself appeared to have become a story in which she was a spectator as much as a participant. A former girlfriend remarks, “nothing was real about you, and you were just in this film about your life.” The narrative moves towards an increasingly abstract and urgent conclusion. Suicide makes an appearance as more than just a record sleeve; Morley’s father had killed himself when she was a child. Someone wonders if this event drove her to act as she did, to constantly anaesthetise herself through sex and alcohol. It is implied that this trauma constitutes the undefined horror at the heart of her Mancunian darkness; the precise cause of her sudden disappearance, however, is not revealed, but rather deliberately left to the imagination. “Dark and evil beyond possible redemption – is that what happened to you Carol?” Finally the mirror shatters, the film snaps, “something dramatic happened”. The voices break up, the imagery culminates in a shot of a graveyard, one possible destination, followed by another, a train leaving the station.

The relief of her escape is almost tangible in the lingering perspective of the gradually shrinking carriage. On the showing of this peculiarly intense and innovative work, the return journey was well worth making.