The Advertising Standards Association (ASA) recently announced that they were going to consider investigating eight complaints made against a Marks & Spencer TV ad - the issue being that the combination of (fictional character!) Gene Hunt's comments linked to the appearance of an underwear model were offensive and demeaning to women. The Daily Mash produced quite a brilliant satirical take on this in its "M&S Ad Offensive to Everyone" article.

Ofcom lists the number of audience complaints, although it does not list complaints (excluding those that refer to fairness or privacy) where there were fewer than ten complainants, on their website. The BBC has its own complaints procedures and received a whopping fifteen thousand in September, although entirely separate issues on Nick Griffin and Terry Wogan made it an unusually high month.

All of this has led me to consider the question on when should one take complaints seriously? Is there a statistically significant number that might be considered representative of a significant number of members of the public? Ten complaints hardly seems to be statistically significant (although of course they could just be the visible manifestation of a wider group), but how many hundreds or thousands of people offended should we judge to be sufficient to allow a complaint to be taken seriously? One of the issues with any number-driven complaints procedure is that anyone who is sufficiently cranky, or any public group that is sufficiently organised can have a disproportionately high impact in terms of being taken seriously.

For all the people who get offended by particular language sexual images or religious views, there are usually equal numbers of other people who have no problems with them. However, those views generally tend not to be voiced - hard though it may be to believe, there are those of us who know how to use the remote to switch away from things that offend us. There are even those of us who as parents are prepared to make our own judgements about what we allow our children to watch, rather than relying on those of the Daily Mail. Mainly we don't spend our times complaining, because we have better things to do with our lives than get in a froth about what is on TV. If we don't find anything we want to watch, either because we are offended by language, violence or sex, or because X-Factor is on, then we can always find something to watch from our LoveFilm subscription, Sky+ box, iPlayer or YouTube. And even then if we can't find anything to watch, then we could listen to the radio, read a book, write a blog or maybe even talk to our families.

So basically, we don't have the complaints unit of each broadcaster or Ofcom on speed dial to register constant complaints, because we have choices, and we know how to exercise them. I started getting annoyed with AA Gill's restaurant reviews in the Sunday Times because he seemed to spend less and less time on actually reviewing a restaurant than prattling on about some inconsequential aspect of his journey to get there, or something "The Blonde" said. So now I just skipped the review. Sadly the AA Gill syndrome has extended to other feature writers and now Clarkson seems to forget that generally speaking, a motoring review should actually include some information about the car. But I didn't phone up News International to make a complaint, I just switched to the FT Weekend.

So here is my suggestion - instead of figuring out what is the right number of complaints to take seriously, or how do to counterbalance the sane people with the chronic whingers, why not just get rid of all complaints procedures that relate to offensive material? Bin the lot of them, and let the money currently spent on complaints procedures go back into programming, "offensive" or not. I can see a continued role for dealing with genuine complaints about factually incorrect content or impartiality issues, where an objective arbitration process could be applied. If a person is not capable of changing a channel if they get offended then they should not be taken seriously full stop. For the really seriously offensive stuff, like the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross scandal, the BBC Trust were perfectly capable of responding to the public without the need for a process, and indeed the broadcasters should be trusted to manage this process themselves, because as they surely know,more offended viewers will ultimately mean fewer of them.