So, my first webpage in over two months. Sorry about the delay. I tried to write webpages during those two months, I really tried, but in truth I was unable. You see, for the past while I have been suffering from a kind of creeping illiteracy, a progressive loss of mental faculties that can only result from prolonged and repeated exposure to seriously crap TV.
And I'm not talking about traditional Christmas TV fare, because I barely watched TV over Christmas. I'm talking about work, where I essentially get paid to watch TV. It wasn't too bad in the summer: I was working on satellite TV, which had 100 channels, and even though every single one of them was awful, at least the content was constantly changing. Now, however, I'm working on terrestrial TV, and since no terrestrial TV is broadcast in Belgium, we have to use recorded streams. This means we get a handful of channels which show the same thing again and again in endlessly repeating two-minute loops. It's truly mind-numbing.
And if I had to pick a TV show that I really wouldn't want to see in an endlessly repeating two-minute loop, it would be BBC1's imbecilic Kilroy. For those who haven't seen it, Kilroy is probably best described as a more staid, conservative, but equally repulsive version of Jerry Springer. The repulsiveness is due in no small part to the host, former Labour MP Robert Kilroy-Silk, who treats both the audience and the topic being discussed with an astonishing amount of smugness and condescension. Silk, his audience (who seem to be hand-picked for their ignorance), and the format of the programme ensure that nothing ever rises above the banal and vulgar. In the particular two-minute sequence on my TV, the topic for 'debate' is paedophiles, and we get to watch Smirk elicit "Death's-too-good-for-'em" ravings from various audience members. This kind of stuff really isn't helpful.
The other channels are arguably worse. On BBC2 is a two-minute loop of an American kids' show called Bailey Kipper's Point of View, about a smartarsed kid and his annoying family. Death's-too-good-for-'em, I say. The programme is stupid, incredibly unsubtle and far too loud, even when the sound is off. One inane 20-second segment after another flashes by. Like so many kids' shows I chance upon these days, it seems actively designed to reduce the viewer's attention span. The same could be said of Teletubbies, which endlessly loops on another channel. If you grow up watching this stuff, what chance have you got of concentrating on anything longer than a commercial break? Maybe that's the point.
Another channel has the closing histrionics of The Young and the Restless. Another has a sports report, which is identical to every sports report you've ever seen. And let's not mention the channels with advertising.
Seeing the same piece of TV again and again and again, you really start to notice the strings being pulled. Kilroy-Silk carefully ushering the talk along so that nothing too penetrating emerges. The calculated inanity of kids' TV. The mindless hand-me-down phrasings of sports reporters. Face it, the people who make these programmes hate you. They make TV for idiots. On commercial TV, the reason for this is obvious: to sell to as wide an audience as possible you have to reach for the lowest common denominator, and then lower still, just to be safe. I don't think there is much hope for commercial TV. But what excuse does a non-commercial service like the BBC have for showing such rubbish?
No doubt the populist BBC executives would say that they are 'responding to public taste' and 'giving the people what they want'. (A debatable proposition: overall TV viewing figures are declining.) But what is public taste?' From the words of TV executives, you would think that it was some transcendent and unfathomable entity, a bit like God, whose whims and caprices they must obey. In reality, however, public taste is almost entirely determined by the media. People can only choose from what's available. And just as people might develop a taste for stewed rat in a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter, so people have developed a taste for the paltry offerings found on TV. Rather than responding to public taste, TV creates it. And by contributing the same general level of garbage, the BBC executives reveal themselves to be of the same profit-driven mindset as their neighbours in commercial TV. Which shouldn't come as a surprise.
It's a vicious circle. As TV keeps aiming for the lowest common denominator, this then becomes the new standard in public taste, so then TV has to aim lower, which then becomes the new standard, and so on. And so we have an increasingly trashy parade of 'reality' shows, talk shows, nostalgia shows, fly-on-the-wall dramas, 'docudramas', soap operas, sports reports, kids' cartoons, panel games, soap operas, and soap operas in disguise.
But it doesn't have to be like this.