The surest sign of the end of an English summer is the drizzle of complaint in the papers that Britain is a less attractive place to live than... (Fill in missing country). Journalists fresh from holidays abroad are keen to bring the bad news about British food, cost of living, weather and culture.

Let me add to this litany of complaints. On holiday in France, I picked up the daily Le Figaro and was drawn to a two-page feature about the future of the novel. In a characteristically prolix fashion, the article posed questions about the next season: the successes, the scandals, the surprises and the prizes. What, how, when, who will they be?

So far unexceptional to a British eye, even one habituated to "Arts specials" in the broadsheets, which, to take a typical example, examine "The life and crimes of Winona Ryder", "Why Robin Williams makes the perfect movie bad-guy" and "Reports from the mosh-pit at this year's Reading Festival".

The final question Le Figaro asked was: who will present which book programme on TV? Not the book programme, but which book programme. Which of the four book programmes, that is.

Not so long ago there were at least three book programmes on British television. Now? One quarter of the 30 minutes that the BBC's major channels devote weekly to discussing the arts - "The Late Review" - is often devoted to a book. The book, if all goes to plan, will be adored by one member of the team and savaged by the others. Or vice versa.

And there is, of course, "The Booker Programme", but that's a quasi-sporting event in which pundits get to discuss the odds, disparage the shortlisted books and swap literary gossip. Reading may well be as important a part of the "life-style" of television viewers as DIY, gardening and cooking, but there is no place for it on the schedules of public television. On radio, programmes such as "A Good Read" and "Open Book" offer discussions about books with authors, readers and critics; television is a literary tundra.

There is, apparently, "no audience" for such programmes, but a glance at the bestseller lists shows that hundreds of thousands of people have read Ian McEwan's Atonement and Antony Beevor's Berlin, which suggests that there may well be millions of disenfranchised viewers who feel spurned by the broadcasters and take their revenge in the only way left to them. Or, of course, are too busy reading to watch television.

In the early 1980s there was a weekly arts programme, "Aquarius", the predecessor of "The South Bank Show". For a time it was fronted by Peter Hall and the programme makers had the idea of doing a film that argued that cooking was art. I thought at the time that the argument was a little tenuous, but I admired (and envied) their success in getting the entire crew into a three Michelin-starred restaurant in France run by a fashionable chef (a "genius", no less) to sample and talk about his latest creations.

I'm ashamed that I thought at the time it was a sublimely inspired scam, but I see now that it was a prescient, even visionary, piece of television, prefiguring the public's preference for food over art. It confirmed what the French director and enfant terrible, Jérôme Savary, said to me when I took over the National Theatre: "Don't go and see the plays, get someone to do it for you whom you trust. And make sure you have a good restaurant: people care more about eating than theatre."

While it's a Sisyphean task to attempt to make an arts programme for a major channel, it's a simple matter to persuade a TV executive of the necessity of Gary, Jamie, Delia, Ainsley, Rick, Anthony, Hugh or Nigella travelling to any part of the globe in search of a good television meal. I can strongly recommend a visit to a restaurant I went to last week in Tokyo, which has the great virtue of making cooking into theatre, therefore killing two genres with one programme. It's described in the restaurant guide as "Japanese country-style dining raised to an artform".

The "country-style" refers less to the food than the décor. Though of course faux country, it's not draped with horse brasses and pitchforks, but is all rough-planed aged wood, as pure and unassertive as all (most) Japanese design. You sit at a three-sided bar, in the well of which there is a raised platform on which two chefs kneel to prepare all the food.

You place your order with a waiter, who shouts it to the chefs, who shout back, and throughout the meal a constant vocal percussion bubbles above the conversation. The chefs are flanked by well-weathered chopping boards and an arsenal of knives, and the ingredients are ranged about them like a Provençal market, the cutting, gutting, slicing and grilling taking place within 18 inches of your plate.

To watch a spider crab with legs the length of a child's arm being cracked and dressed by one chef while the other threads small mushrooms on a thin skewer and deftly fillets red snapper, placing them on a griddle above a red-hot element while they swap scat phrases with the waiters, is to watch a performance of dazzling virtuosity.

A waiter sloshes cool sake into a small square wooden box (for good manners always overflowing into its saucer), I put a small wooden spoonful of salt on the edge of my sake-box, and as I drink the sour-sweet wine, the chef puts a dish on a long wooden paddle - scallops and ginger - holds it out to me and I think: yes, perhaps Jérôme Savary was right.

The Inakaya Restaurant in the Roppongi district is more blatantly theatrical than most - the backstage has become the forestage - but the similarities between all theatres and restaurants are close. You live to please and you please to live. You recognise your success as it occurs. You work during other people's leisure time and you have time off when everyone else is working. You belong to a separate caste from the customers and you deride the tyranny of their daily routine.

It's an illusion, of course, but it's a fantasy that sustains many actors, dressers, directors, and, I suspect, waiters and chefs. Perhaps, like the theatre, working in a restaurant is a young person's game, which is perhaps what the health correspondent from the Japanese equivalent of the Financial Times was hinting at when he interviewed me about Iris, which is about to open in Tokyo. "What do you think about good health?" he asked me. "I'm all for it," I replied.

© Richard Eyre