You could almost envy the victims of Chinese media repression. Sick of small-screen idiocy, the bouncers at China’s broadcasting authority issued a directive last week to cut the number of TV game shows, reality shows and talent contests.

State officials might have been able to swallow consumer capitalism, but apparently they can’t quite stomach the side-servings of materialism, triviality and vulgarity that so many of those shows feed off, then regurgitate and then tastefully re-ingest.

Meanwhile in India, those very same formats were being celebrated after Sushil Kumar, a 26-year-old clerk whose family couldn’t afford a TV set, became the first person to win $1m on the country’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Sure enough, as if to underline the movie-like social mobility smugness of the whole thing, commentators promptly highlighted the similarity to the 2008 Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.