“The future,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “is but the obsolete in reverse.” From the Parthenon to Battersea Power Station, decay has a powerful glamour, reminding us of our own brief interlude among the living and the eons of rot yet to come. Everybody loves a ruin; except, it seems, when the haggard structure is an architectural spook from the recent past, in which instance we are more likely to will its swift exorcism than to linger over its metaphysical import. Consider the case of the notorious Gateshead car park, designed by Owen Luder (whose practice was responsible for the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, recently demolished but equally disreputable in its time). The car park was completed in 1969 and famous as the multi-storey summit from which Michael Caine flings a gangland rival in the 1971 film Get Carter. That iconic moment has not saved the car park from eking out its last years as an image of all that many would like to forget about the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, when those who designed such massive concrete monoliths were happy to label themselves “brutalists”.

Is such a building worth saving? A Channel 4 series, Demolition, starting this Sunday, seems to suggest not. Luder’s great concrete strata are among the architectural remains that the public have been invited - in a reversal of the BBC’s Restoration - to vote into oblivion. Early press coverage hinted that the winner - that is, the loser - would actually be demolished: a pretty implausible denouement, given planning laws that can keep a building such as Luder’s hanging on for decades. Long enough, in fact, to attract a new kind of attention, from contemporary artists.