Who on earth was the mystery TV viewer who wrote to Newsnight Review spluttering that Kirsty Wark was presenting the show “naked from the waist down”? Because I'd like to buy that person a human anatomy book. I've studied the pictures carefully, see, and Kirsty is wearing a perfectly nice black dress that finishes a couple of inches above the knee. She is definitely not sitting there, panty-free, brandishing her “lady garden”.

So this means that there's somebody out there who thinks that a woman's legs grow directly from her midriff with no bits in between, like a Mrs Potatohead. Someone whose idea of the female body never developed beyond a three-year-old's drawing. Perhaps we should send a sympathy card to the BBC, which now knows the calibre of Newsnight viewers.

Of course there's another explanation - that this man (I've no evidence he is male, apart from that he so obviously is) is one of the seemingly growing band of habitual complainers who spend their lives seeking reasons to be offended, who'd see sinful messages in Muffin the Mule and probably cover up the table legs at home lest he is tempted to dry-hump them.

If you're the sort of person who can burst a blood vessel over the sight of Kirsty Wark's knees you may suffer a full myocardial infarction if you watch Springwatch with Bill Oddie. Reluctant as I am to even write the words “sex” and “Bill Oddie” in the same sentence, I must. Because viewers have been hitting their redial buttons to the BBC to complain about this excellent nature show that Oddie has allegedly soiled. Instead of adopting the sombre, reverential tones we expect when describing animal sex, Oddie said of a postcoital sparrow: “That's a wing trembler she's just had there.” Of beetles copulating, he said: “He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady... this boy is horny.”

Now, granted, this is a more colourful style than Sir David Attenborough's. But compared with what you hear in most school playgrounds it's positively chaste. And if we want more kids to take an interest in nature rather than, say, getting bladdered at 9, or fostering a collection of flick knives, then perhaps it's helpful to make it edgy. But, oh no. Viewers are “outraged”.

But then outrage isn't exactly in short supply these days. It is apt that the BBC should choose now to broadcast Filth, the drama starring Julie Walters as the late Mary Whitehouse (who once complained about Pinky and Perky), because public prudishness and disapproval seem to be flourishing ironically at a time when we're supposed to be more liberal than ever. Remember when Terry Wogan presented Points of View in a pair of moleskin trousers? The BBC was “flooded” with complaints from people appalled by the “bulge” in his trousers. They demanded that he take more care over “what side he dressed”. One wrote: “I have just watched Points of View with my husband. When the camera panned out on Terry Wogan, I didn't know where to look.” Madam - I think we know where you looked.

Who exactly is being dirty-minded here? I saw that programme and don't recall leaping over the couch screeching: “Check out the trouser snake on Wogan!” To see sexual perversion everywhere you must already have it on the brain - like Victorian Dad from Viz magazine, who makes his children change into their swimming costumes in the dark because it's disgusting to look at your own naked body.

I suspect that complaining is becoming the prude's masturbation. Why else would you find time, as 620 people did, to hyperventilate over a Pot Noodle ad (broadcast after the 9pm watershed) depicting a man with a brass horn in his trouser pocket and the strapline: “Have you got the Pot Noodle horn?” When an ad for Jamie Oliver's School Dinners appeared 18 people protested in fury. It featured a picture of Oliver apparently covered in school-type graffiti. The complainants were blind to the wider aim - conveying healthy-eating messages to children in a medium they might read - because all they could see was a pair of scrawled breasts alongside the words “Don't come back salad boy” and “Stick your carrots up your ar” (the word wasn't completed). The complainants thought this “offensive to women and gay men” and the advert “irresponsible” for appearing to condone graffiti.

The individual's urge to jolly well have his or her voice heard appears to be mounting, fuelled perhaps by the free-for-all that is the internet. In 2007 the number of complaints about adverts, for example, reached a record high of 14,080 - up 9.6 per cent on 2006.

But my beef is that complainers enjoy a grossly disproportionate amount of power. It requires just one person to protest about a TV programme, advert or radio show remark and it must be investigated by a committee and a report written when often it's an obvious waste of everyone's time. My favourite example is when the Broadcasting Standards Commission forced Channel 4 to broadcast its adjudication upholding a complaint by one viewer about violence and bad language in Ken Loach's brilliant, award-winning drama Ladybird, Ladybird, the most severe sanction it could pass.

I find this tyranny of the mouthy few far more offensive than any Wogan lunchbox. If this is the fruit of people power, then bring on despotism. It's hard not to agree with Socrates: that democracy has its disadvantages. Don't give the public their say - they can't be trusted with it. It seems like a nice idea, then look what happens. They vote Chantelle the winner of Celebrity Big Brother and pick the wrong Nancy in I'd Do Anything. It's your prerogative to have a right of reply. But please don't use it to taint the rest of us with your fantasies of imaginary knickerless presenters.

Times Recommends

• Punish savers and make them spend
• A loose cannon all too likely to be fired
• Wealth will bloom again