h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I recently read (or heard) that the average length of a scene in a British soap used to be 3 - 4 minutes, but now it's something like 1.5 minutes. The reduced scene length was attributed to a reduction in attention span. Was there an associated reduction in intelligence? Even with an attention span down to 25 minutes (it used to be 40 - 45) the average person should still be able to cope with a 3 minute scene in a soap!

And then there was Police Squad. For those that haven't heard of it, Police Squad was a spoof of all the 70s US cop shows, devised by the people behind Airplane and starring Leslie Nielsen. The series was dropped after only 6 episodes because the TV executives reckoned that the average American attention span couldn't cope with it (or so I heard). Give me a break! Each episode was only about 30 minutes long. OK, so there was a lot going on, but that was half the fun!