"One step up from porn"

‘Participation TV’ is what we in the 'industry' call those interminable quizzes that ITV and others run overnight to swindle viewers out of cash. You know, the onces presented by perma-tanned grinning morons weilding big red 'phones. At first, they seem like harmless fun, and strangley addictive viewing. But watch carefully and you soon realise the cunning and dishonesty hat lies at their core. They are nothing short of theft, and specifically target the poor and stupid who are least able to afford them.

It is true that nobody is forcing viewers to ring up. But they may as well be. Over the last few weeks, it has been revealed publicly that producers, phone operators, and broadcasters have used a variety of dishonest and misleading techniques to convince people to take part. They've urged viewers to call in and influence a proagramme that has already been recorded(Saturday Kitchen); they've suggested viewers enter a draw to play a game, when that day's player has already been chosen (Richard and Judy); they've got members of their own production team to fake calls and pretend to be winners (Brainteaser); and they've simply overcharged viewers for their 'participation' (The X Factor, which made £200,000 by overcharging red-button voters on the Sky platform). So while nobody has been forced to phone up, we can hardly claim that they gave informed consent when they decided to do so. They based their decision on incorrect and misleading information, and often gave their money thinking that they stood a chance of winning more, when they absolutely did not.

Premium rate phone numbers have made their way into all sorts of programmes, and represent a great way for programme makers and broadcasters to generate extra revenue. Those of us who work in development know how important it is to think up ways to weave them into our ideas, especially in this era of ‘360 degree’ programming (that's what we call it when we rip you off on the web, on the phone, and on screen at the same time. And afterwards we'll try and rip you off in a podcast, just as soon as we've caught up and figured out what taht is).

But within the last couple of years, an altogether more serious kind of programme has been born: no longer is the premium rate cash grab an add-on to an already entertaining programme, it has instead become the main and sole purpose of the programme. Presenters unlike any we had seen before are suddenly on our screens for hours at a time, urging, begging, pleading with us to phone in. This is big business, with programme makers raking cash in--over a million per week in some cases.

So now channels are pulling their participation shows left right and centre, apparently scandalised by the ‘irregularities’ in their operation. In truth, they’ve all known about it for ages. There’s simply been an unspoken deal between the producers, the broadcasters, and the telecoms operators that as long as the money is flooding in, it doesn’t matter how dodgy the programme is. Because they've always known exactly what is going on. One leading head of a production company I worked for commented when she got a huge commission for this style of programming that it was 'only one step up from porn'.

Once again, the TV business has reacted like a small child caught with his hand in the biscuit tin: it has more or less universally denied any knowledge of wrongdoing, blaming technical issues, or misunderstandings. Everyone has blamed someone else, with the channels now trying to keep their own reputations untarnished by immediately stopping the broadcast f all competitions and games relying on premium rate phone numbers. They wouldn’t be doing this unless they strongly suspected (or knew) that there was far more dirt to come in a huge range of programmes. This is damage limitation.

The list so far of programmes and companies that have ripped people off is long, and growing daily. How damaged could these ‘brands’ be by this news? We’re talking Endemol, ITV, the BBC, and Cactus, not some unknown phone operator with nothing to lose. And what about the reputations of some of the nation’s much loved programmes themselves? Ricahrd & Judy, The X Factor, Saturday Kitchen, Quizmania, Brainteaser… will anyone ever trust them fully again?

Suddenly TV is being revealed not just to be a trusted educator, babysitter, and entertainer sitting in the corner of all of our living rooms, but also a dodgy, quick-talking, lying conman and thief, to be treated with great suspicion. No wonder people in the TV world are panicking. The truth is finally out.

TV causes cancer, Alzheimers, and autism, claims psychologist

A report from Dr Aric Sigman in science journal Biologist lists 15 health problems that can be attributed to excessive TV viewing in childhood including childhood obesity, eyesight problems, diabetes and hormonal changes. It is apparently based on Sigman's analysis of 35 separate scientific studies, in response to which he writes: "Given the evidence, it would be prudent to cordon off the early years of child development as a time when screen media is excluded and then introduced judiciously as the child matures."

Here are his key claims:

- The average six-year-old in Britain has spent one full year watching TV, and more than half of three-year-olds have a set in their bedrooms

- The risk of developing Alzheimer's increases with each extra daily hour of television viewing among people aged 20 to 60

- Watching TV is linked with obesity, lower immunity, premature puberty, poor concentration, reading difficulties, raised cholesterol and type 2 diabetes

Now, not much of this is new. We've seen it all before in various studies. And while some might think that Sigman is pushing things a bit far in claiming that TV is as bad as all that, there is a mounting body of evidence that suggests that it can in fact contribute to all of the problems he mentions.

The TV industry is, naturally, up in arms about such research, and makes every effort to rubbish it. The timing could not be worse: just as funding for children's programming in the UK is being slashed, and junk-food advertising bans are being imposed during children's programmes, we're now being told that maybe our kids shouldn't be watching so much TV anyway, because it might actually be causing them to reach puberty much earlier, as well as increase their chances of developing cancer or dementia in later life.

If the industry took a more responsible position, we could perhaps allow it a place in the debate about how to proceed from here. I don't doubt that TV can be useful for educating children in some very particular circumstances. But while the official line of those that make it is to argue that advertising junk food to children does not contribute to childhood obesity, I have no respect for them at all. If the adverts didn't influence children's eating habits, why would advertisers spend so much money on trying to do just that? They are not motivated by a desire to see children's programming budgets increasing , and why should they be? Their business is selling habitually addictive fats and sugars to children. So when it comes to research that suggests actual physical hard caused by television on young bodies, the TV industry would do well to react more responsibly by engaging with the new revelations, rather than attacking them as invalid.

I wonder if one day we will look at TV the same way we look at smoking today. My generation grew up laughing at the idea that not long before we were alive, people apparently had no idea that inhaling the smoke of burning tobacco might actually be bad for the body. How absurd might it have seemed back then to suggest that cancer was a risk for smokers? But now we find it totally unsurprising that this is the case: of course it's harmful to smoke. Maybe one day claims like these about TV won't seem so alarmist, and we'll look back at today's news with much less surprise than Five's director of children's programmes, Nick Wilson, who rubbished the news as no more than "a good headline ... [to be] forgotten in two months' time".

Crap on TV

If you've been reading the previous entries in this blog, you might, like me, have noticed a disturbing new trend in British TV: there's been a definite increase in the amount of crap on TV. And I don't mean that in a metaphorical sense, I mean actual crap--the brown, smelly, stuff that comes out of your bottom.

I'm not sure why there's so much shit on television. It would seem that as we start the 21st Century, TV viewers are actually regressing to some sort of retarded anal phase. Here's a short list of some copraphilic shows that have found their way onto mainstream TV. Feel free to add any you can think of, as I'm sure there are more:

You Are What You Eat
in which Gillian McKeith inspects punters' turds.

Little Miss Nicky
in which a reality TV punter does unpleasant jobs, usually involving turds.

Little Britain
in which 'Anne' gives some children a picture made by smearing a turd on a canvas.

Colin and Justin on the Estate
in which C&J get all upset about pigeon turds (see entry below)

Glade Touch N Spray commercial
in which a small child bemoans the scent of his own turd (didn't we used to avoid actually mentioning excrement in bathroom product ads?)

[amusingly, the spell check suggested 'Colon & Justin']

Child Genius (C4)

Last night's Child Genius on Channel 4 promised to be the first part of a series that will revisit 10 'gifted' children every two years to monitor their progress in life--a sort of Seven Up! for the 21st Century. And with extremely intelligent children. But the programme stood up well as a one-off documentary showing what life is like for these children and their parents, despite it's hour and a half running time. No irritating pre ad break trails of what was to come, nor reminders of what you'd just seen three minutes ago. This was how all documentaries should be made. It was modern, clear, and insightful. Totally unpatronising to both audience and participants, Child Geniuswas such a refreshing thing to see on TV, especially on the increasingly tabloid Channel 4.

It would be so easy to hate the kids featured in the programme. They're freaks. They can do things many adults will never be able to do, and that can make people jealous. But the beauty of Wall to Wall's film was that it avoided the temptaion to portray them as mere robots, or the product of overly pushy parents. The parents were pushy, it's true, but you couldn't blame most of them. What else could they do you do but encourage and stimulate their children when they discovered they had amazing abilities to do maths, play the piano, cook, write, etc? Anything other approach would risk condemning them to years of boredome and frustration.

The film introduced us to a variety of gifted children, each with a very different personality and set of skills. The participants ranged from the completely freakish family whose hothousing of all of their offspring looked nothing short of child abuse (the mother had decided it was her duty to produce doctors for the world. Tha father was barely allowed to speak at all), to the charmingly endearing parents who were totally uninterested in their son's IQ score, but instead wanted to know how to help him live a happy life despite his heavy burden of being a wonderful thinker with an extraordinary outlook on the world. This child, Dante, perhaps provided the most touching moments of the programme. His depression seemed totally understandable, and we shared his frustration with having the mental abilities of a very sensitive adult whilst being trapped in the reality of being a child. He strived for perfection in a world where perfection is impossible--a summary of the human condition that most adults on TV would have difficulty expressing as clearly and simply as he did.

At no time did the programme makers give in to the pressure to make any of the parents look better or worse than they probably were. They were real people in a state of genuine confusion over how to react to their unusual children. They were caring, harsh, encouraging, and flawed, all at the same time, and it is no easy thing to put that accross in a film. Only the Addams Family-like doctor and spiritual leader breeders came over as cruel and insane, and it was hard to see that as anyone's fault but their own. The programme was brave to show their peculiarities in full, too.


If there were more challenging, intelligently made programmes like this one on our screens, perhaps TV would be helping to bring up a generation of thinkers and doers like those we saw in Child Genius. Instead we seem to be breeding overweight, lazy, superstitious drones to be future participants for Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, and Fat Club. Lazy, rubbish programmes help make lazy rubbish children.

Link to Child Genius promo

A glimpse of the future

Now we can get a 360 degree view of our TVs. Thank you, Toshiba.

Links to The Raw Feed and to the The video.

8.15pm, Tuesday night

Channel surfing. A snapshot:

BBC 1: A televised remedial class for third rate actors. Dreadful script, dreadful direction, dreadful acting, dreadful production values (Holby City).

BBC 2: A woman teaching you how to drink water, inspecting measuring jugs of urine. Surely mankind cannot now be so stupid as to need lessons on how to drink and piss. This programme also appears to feature a punter named 'Gronya' (Dr Alice Roberts: Don't Die Young).

ITV1: Random idiotic members of the public begging on national television for cash handed out by five 'millionaires' who dole out perfunctory insults. It's the televisual equivalent of swearing at beggars on the street (Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway).

Channel 4: A sour faced old bitch inspecting human shit to detect what is wrong with the diet of the 18 stone fat bastards who produced it. And they have to stay in her (show)house. Surely mankind cannot now be so stupid as to need lessons on how to eat and shit (You Are What You Eat: Gillian Moves In).

five: Something about the Titanic. Yawn. This is a documentary which actually just introduced it's thesis with the words "they may not have found any evidence, but..." (Titanic's Final Moments: The True Story).

Colin and Justin on the Estate, Five

This programme looks like it was designed to highlight the total idiocy of the ridiculous features that modern TV requires are built in to any 'factual entertainment' series. One can fully understand how this dross made it to our screens. It ticks all the right boxes on a commissioning editor's imaginary list. In fact, I'm not sure that the list is even imaginary. I wouldn't be surprised if the controllers of today's TV channels had pads printed up with lists of moronic tricks that programmes had to serve up. It'd certainly make their lives easier.

So here's how it goes. The commissioner, probably Ben Frow, was sitting in his office in Covent Garden, weeping quietly to himself about how much money he'd committed to elevating Colin and Justin -- two televisual non-entites -- to the staus of official 'faces' of five. He'd been lured there himself from a decent enough job at C4 where he'd enjoyed some success, only to discover that nobody watches Channel Five whatever you put on it. And now he'd done the same to the property poofs, who'd become even less interesting than they had been on the BBC. It turns out nobody cares about Channel Five. Nobody even cares that it's not called 'Channel' Five any more. They hadn't noticed. They were too busy rotting their brains over on ITV.

Anyway, Mr Comissioner is in his office crying one day, when a proposal arrives in his inbox. He's about to delete it and go for lunch at the Ivy (again) when he decides he may as well read this one first, seeing as its first three words have caught his attention: "Colin and Justin..."

Three minutes later, after he's read the proposal through twice, in his head he's already bough the series. It'll be wonderful: two homos, interior decorators no less, on a council estate in Glasgow. What a culture clash, eh? Moreover, it's regional, it's gritty, there'll be fights, tears, laughter, and soft furnishings. Fucking brilliant. Channel 4 managed to make that fat-tongued loser into a national 'hero' by getting him to whine about school lunches, so maybe five can turn around the fortunes of TV's least interesting cushion plumpers with a rip-off series. Yes! Fianlly, they'll make a difference. Everyone will love this, because it's not just a makeover show, it's a social action programme. It's PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING!

The premise is simple. Colin and Justin, known for their camp but totally unendearing manner, are despatched to some rough-arsed estate in Glasgow to make everything better for the poor peasants who have to put up with the nasty flats and a £50 per room budget to redecorate. The estate is troubled by drugs, litter, decomposing pigeons, crime, gangs, and general poverty. And ColinandJustin (which is which, nobody cares) are going to improve these people's lives through the medium of interior decorating. They're Scottish and gay, and the housing estate is Scottish and repulsive, so it should be a match made in hell (ideal for TV), and they'll even understand each others' accents. It'll "punch above it's weight" and get the channel column inches. Yes... it's a factual TV gem that'll revive the channel's pathetic viewing figures.

Except it's not. It teaches nothing. It is not entertaining. It is predictable. It is dull. It trundles through a formulaic set of format points in such an obvious manner that even the handful of catatonic five viewers who noticed that it had started and the last programme had finished, could see that it was nothing more than the worst kind of TV-making-by-numbers.

So how did Colin and Justin deal with the problem of vandalism and graffiti in the stairwells? They painted them blue. Fucking genius. Why had nobody thought of that before? And when the thugs on the estate came in to rip the heads off the three £2.99 pot plants placed on the window sills and shit on the 'community notice board', you could almost hear the producers creaming themselves as they tittered the word 'conflict' to one another just off-camera. In fact, they'd probably forced a runner to take twice the recommended adult dose of ex-lax so he could crap all over the place for them, and then rip down the charming Ikea window blind (who needs a fucking window blind on a council estate stairwell anyway?).

And how did the interior-decorating faries deal with the disgusting, uninhabitable state of their would-be 'show-flat'? Simple, they shouted at a council official (more conflict) and then knocked down a wall, calling in decorators and plasterers. There was even a hissy fit about the economy biscuits they had to eat. But hang on. Wasn't calling in professionals simply cheating? What of the limited budget that the other residents had to stick to? How could their show-flat be seen as representitive of what a normal resident could manage, asked the council man, dressed in a suit and nerd-specs. Perfect... more conflict, all caught on camera. They even swore. But no actual answer or excuse was given for that one. They just moved on. But hey, it's TV guys!

What everyone making this turd of a programme failed to notice was that we wouldn't care at all. There was no conflict. Instead, there were set-piece TV situations so familiar that five minutes in we were already scrolling through the EPG to find something -- anything -- less irritating to watch than these scotch upholstery experts wretching every time they saw some pigeon poo or a bit of litter.

Pathetic.