Owing to a seasonal bout of depression on my part, and the synchronicity of a few other disappointments in my life, I've been doing a lot of nothing recently. In real terms, this has taken the form of me watching a lot more television, and I'm disappointed to say that it's only confirmed my worst opinions of the 'medium' (so called, according to the American Comic Fred Allen, because anything well done is rare).
I've spent the last few days catching up on the tail end of The X Factor, a programme I had until now easily avoided, as it is endless repeated on the various ITV channels. While it leaves me largely unmoved, I can see the skill that has gone into making this slick, highly polished entertainment format. It's transparent, and I imagine even the millions who watch it religiously can feel themselves being easily manipulated, fooled, and strung along. But that makes it a more honest programme, in my opinion, as it's unpretentious. People want to be swept along by it, and they are happy to be taken in for the ride. It never claims to be doing anything more than it is--entertaining them with bright lights, the almost instant manufacturing of new 'celebrities', and some old recycled tunes. Every dial has been tuned up to the max, and then some, pushing things off the usual scale, and that's why the ratings have done the same.
I've also caught up on occasional repeats of Princess Nikki, a heavily over-scripted, highly artificial manipulated-reality-observational-documentary featuring a former Big Brother contestant who apparently has no interesting characteristics of any kind at all. I can't understand for a second where the interest lies in such a programme. The premise is that Nikki, a spoilt princess, is sent to do work experience for a day or two in a series of jobs usually involving cleaning up shit. One day she's on a farm, the next in a dog kennel, etc. She has tantrums like a 2 year old whenever necessary, and refuses to do what's asked of her. It's a bit like a British version of The Simple Life, but even lower grade. The problem is that Nikki is such a non entity that even the Heat Magazine reading retards who might be interested in her life, must surely be totally un-impressed by her performance. There's no hint of reality to this programme, with everything so heavily manipulated that it can't be fooling anybody. The girl herself is boring, the jobs are boring, the people she meets are boring. In short, the format is boring in every possible way. And that's why the programme falls flat. It seems that the mentally deficient Nikki's own refusal each episode to wade through shit or scrape it up off the floor puts her one step up from the producers of this moronic programme, who seem perfectly happy to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the job of churning out endless amounts of televisual manure.
And finally to The Jeremy Kyle Show. Whatever time of day you might turn on your TV, it's sure to be on one of the ITV channels. And it's totally unwatchable. Is anyone at all still interested in this kind of human zoo? This sub Springer, sub Trisha, sub just about every other programme where we watch the dregs of society attacking each other, is so unoriginal is defies belief. Kyle is one dimensional (though that is a requirement for a host of this kind of programme), the guests are uninteresting , and the 'dilemmas' have all been seen and done before. Kyle's 'thing' seems to be rudeness, but even that's not new. I met the man before this programme was even thought of, and while he's clearly limited, he undoubtedly has the popular touch. 'Ordinary' people will talk to him. And he'll readily bark in their faces that they're 'scum' or idiots. But somehow that's not enough any more. These people don't care whose name is attached to the show--they'll talk to anybody with a studio audience and a microphone. Who even cares for watching plebs degrade themselves any more? In an age when nothing on TV is surprising, and everyone from politicians to musicians, to feminist academics will knowingly humiliate themselves on screen in return for cash, why is anybody still watching Jeremy Kyle and his circus of trolls?
Friday, December 22, 2006
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Time Saving
There's an advert on TV at the moment in which Ainsley Harriot looks mockingly at an 'old fashioned' dishwasher detergent tablet which has been put in a glass case as if to suggest it's some sort of historical curio. Meanwhile he sings the praises of a new kind of detergent tablet that has no wrapper. This apparently saves you time when using it.
It's only an advert, I know, but I think in a small way it shows just how absurd things have become. Apparently we're all so impatient now that we can't even spare the 2 seconds it takes to remove a wrapper from a dishawasher pill.
It's only an advert, I know, but I think in a small way it shows just how absurd things have become. Apparently we're all so impatient now that we can't even spare the 2 seconds it takes to remove a wrapper from a dishawasher pill.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Job For Life
"Less than one in five people working in the broadcast sector think the industry offers them a "job for life"... and more than 10% of respondents work six or seven days per week."
Broadcast (TV industry newspaper) lifestyle survey, 16 November 2006
When I was at university I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a living. I had a few areas of interest which I thought might make good careers--advertising, music production, theatre, broadcasting--but no way of deciding between them. I'd done some work in each of them, and they'd all been pretty enjoyable for a few weeks during the summer break between school or university terms. And why wouldn't they? All of them had a hint of glamour to them, and certainly seemed a lot less like the 'real work' I'd seen my siblings and contemporaries doing (accountancy, medicine, law, etc).
As my finals approached, I felt a sense of panic. Who didn't? What would I do afterwards, I asked myself, especially as I was about to fail. So I half heartedly wrote to three potential employers, desperate to secure employment while I still looked promising. Two were TV companies and one an advertising agency. I ended up accepting a place on a graduate 'training' scheme at a trendy TV company. As fate had it I did alright in my exams, but the job seemed decent enough, and I'd hardly had to look very hard for it. So that's what I did when the time came for me to start earning.
A few years down the line, and a few more contracts served at different TV companies, and I can tell you this: as my holiday jobs had confirmed, TV is great fun to work in. But that fun only lasts for a few weeks or months at a time. Before you know it, you have to move on. Find a new job, find a new company, find a new niche. Working in TV as an adult is shit for exactly the same reasons it's such fun as a kid: projects and engagements last a short, limited amount of time. The pay is decent enough considering you don't have to do much. Having even slightly-above-average intelligence puts you well above most of the other people you are competing with in the workplace. Limited knowledge is no barrier to getting far.
But who wants to work for merely decent pay? Who wants to work in an industry that's scared of committing to you? Who wants to work with morons? Is that a career worth pursuing? Imagine the TV business as a potential partner and you might get what i mean: medium to low earner, afraid of long term committment, below average intelligence, bullshitter, lazy... Not someone you'd want to spend your life with, even if they are fun for a brief fling.
So is it any wonder that people working in television can't imagine themselves doing it for life? I can't wait to find something challenging, interesting, and important to do with myself. Yes, it's fun for a bit. And sometimes it's enjoyable. But it's of so little importance and worth that it can't be a serious long term life plan. No, TV is fluff. That's true for viewers and those who make it alike. Just like chewing gum, it might taste OK for a while, but it gives no nourishment, and ends up flavourless and bland if you stay with it too long.
Broadcast (TV industry newspaper) lifestyle survey, 16 November 2006
When I was at university I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a living. I had a few areas of interest which I thought might make good careers--advertising, music production, theatre, broadcasting--but no way of deciding between them. I'd done some work in each of them, and they'd all been pretty enjoyable for a few weeks during the summer break between school or university terms. And why wouldn't they? All of them had a hint of glamour to them, and certainly seemed a lot less like the 'real work' I'd seen my siblings and contemporaries doing (accountancy, medicine, law, etc).
As my finals approached, I felt a sense of panic. Who didn't? What would I do afterwards, I asked myself, especially as I was about to fail. So I half heartedly wrote to three potential employers, desperate to secure employment while I still looked promising. Two were TV companies and one an advertising agency. I ended up accepting a place on a graduate 'training' scheme at a trendy TV company. As fate had it I did alright in my exams, but the job seemed decent enough, and I'd hardly had to look very hard for it. So that's what I did when the time came for me to start earning.
A few years down the line, and a few more contracts served at different TV companies, and I can tell you this: as my holiday jobs had confirmed, TV is great fun to work in. But that fun only lasts for a few weeks or months at a time. Before you know it, you have to move on. Find a new job, find a new company, find a new niche. Working in TV as an adult is shit for exactly the same reasons it's such fun as a kid: projects and engagements last a short, limited amount of time. The pay is decent enough considering you don't have to do much. Having even slightly-above-average intelligence puts you well above most of the other people you are competing with in the workplace. Limited knowledge is no barrier to getting far.
But who wants to work for merely decent pay? Who wants to work in an industry that's scared of committing to you? Who wants to work with morons? Is that a career worth pursuing? Imagine the TV business as a potential partner and you might get what i mean: medium to low earner, afraid of long term committment, below average intelligence, bullshitter, lazy... Not someone you'd want to spend your life with, even if they are fun for a brief fling.
So is it any wonder that people working in television can't imagine themselves doing it for life? I can't wait to find something challenging, interesting, and important to do with myself. Yes, it's fun for a bit. And sometimes it's enjoyable. But it's of so little importance and worth that it can't be a serious long term life plan. No, TV is fluff. That's true for viewers and those who make it alike. Just like chewing gum, it might taste OK for a while, but it gives no nourishment, and ends up flavourless and bland if you stay with it too long.
Friday, November 10, 2006
Television is a drug
According to a report in The Times the other day, psychologists discovered that children aged 6 to 8 respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of drink. Alcoholics are addicted to drink. So you might reasonably take this to mean that children between the ages of 6 and 8 are addicted to television.
It's worse than it sounds, though. In a series of experiments conducted in primary schools, children were put in front of a computer screen where images would be flashed up in front of them, side by side. Their reaction would be monitored to see which images attracted the most attention. Alarmingly, an image of a blank television screen proved more appealing than that of a smiling face, with most children looking at the picture of a TV as soon as it was flashed up. The article explains that babies have a natural 'face bias', and will opt for the image of the face over any other. But these 6 to 8 year olds did not. So somewhere between birth and 6 years old, children are learning to favour TV screens to human faces,
Regardless of what children are actually watching on television (or adults, for that matter), something has gone wrong when they instinctively prefer to look at a TV instead of a face. They could be watching University Challenge for all I care. It'd still be a problem. It would seem that we could end the debate on teachers wearing veils altogether, if we just replaced teachers with televisions. Who cares if kids can fully respond to their teachers without seeing their facial expressions? Put a TV in the room and they won't even be looking her way to see if she's wearing a Burkha or a Bikini.
Things will only get worse. Nobody believes that TV's doing the harm it actually is. Sure, we might all watch more than we should, or rely on it to take the edge off our boredom, but it's not that bad, right? It's not having as negative effect on us a cigarettes or junk food, surely?
The cold facts might change your mind: by the age of 18, the average child has sat through 16,000 murders, and 200,000 assorted acts of violence. Most couples have more contact with TV characters than with one another. By the age of 75, we will each have spent more than twelve full years watching TV. The average Briton now spends over four hours a day watching TV. That's more time over a lifetime than he or she spends doing paid work. 86% of children aged six and below watch up to six hours of TV a day.
As this piece from the Observer a year or so ago explains, TV changes each of us in ways we just don't realise: "the more a person watches TV, the poorer they believe themselves to be, the less happy they think they are compared to others and the more they feel compelled to spend -- on one estimate, £2 extra for every hour spent watching TV. Children who watch a lot of television are more likely to be violent, to be bullies and to be fat and unfit in later life." Scary stuff. But none of this is really news to anyone, least of all those of us who make the programmes. It's all common sense.
TV distorts people's ideas of what is normal, what is healthy, what is enough. When we make programmes that are 'aspirational' (a word much used by programme commissioners), we know that the millions we hope will watch them, will feel worse when they turn off the box. They'll think they should build a new life in the country, redecorate their neighbour's front room, or abandon their children in the wilderness to teach them manners. But in reality, none of them will. Instead, they'll feel like slightly worse people for not being as exciting and proactive as everyone they see on their screens.
It's worse than it sounds, though. In a series of experiments conducted in primary schools, children were put in front of a computer screen where images would be flashed up in front of them, side by side. Their reaction would be monitored to see which images attracted the most attention. Alarmingly, an image of a blank television screen proved more appealing than that of a smiling face, with most children looking at the picture of a TV as soon as it was flashed up. The article explains that babies have a natural 'face bias', and will opt for the image of the face over any other. But these 6 to 8 year olds did not. So somewhere between birth and 6 years old, children are learning to favour TV screens to human faces,
Regardless of what children are actually watching on television (or adults, for that matter), something has gone wrong when they instinctively prefer to look at a TV instead of a face. They could be watching University Challenge for all I care. It'd still be a problem. It would seem that we could end the debate on teachers wearing veils altogether, if we just replaced teachers with televisions. Who cares if kids can fully respond to their teachers without seeing their facial expressions? Put a TV in the room and they won't even be looking her way to see if she's wearing a Burkha or a Bikini.
Things will only get worse. Nobody believes that TV's doing the harm it actually is. Sure, we might all watch more than we should, or rely on it to take the edge off our boredom, but it's not that bad, right? It's not having as negative effect on us a cigarettes or junk food, surely?
The cold facts might change your mind: by the age of 18, the average child has sat through 16,000 murders, and 200,000 assorted acts of violence. Most couples have more contact with TV characters than with one another. By the age of 75, we will each have spent more than twelve full years watching TV. The average Briton now spends over four hours a day watching TV. That's more time over a lifetime than he or she spends doing paid work. 86% of children aged six and below watch up to six hours of TV a day.
As this piece from the Observer a year or so ago explains, TV changes each of us in ways we just don't realise: "the more a person watches TV, the poorer they believe themselves to be, the less happy they think they are compared to others and the more they feel compelled to spend -- on one estimate, £2 extra for every hour spent watching TV. Children who watch a lot of television are more likely to be violent, to be bullies and to be fat and unfit in later life." Scary stuff. But none of this is really news to anyone, least of all those of us who make the programmes. It's all common sense.
TV distorts people's ideas of what is normal, what is healthy, what is enough. When we make programmes that are 'aspirational' (a word much used by programme commissioners), we know that the millions we hope will watch them, will feel worse when they turn off the box. They'll think they should build a new life in the country, redecorate their neighbour's front room, or abandon their children in the wilderness to teach them manners. But in reality, none of them will. Instead, they'll feel like slightly worse people for not being as exciting and proactive as everyone they see on their screens.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Factual Entertainment
"I love it when people say I'm making shit TV."
Natalka Znak, controller of factual entertainment at Granada
I develop programme ideas for new TV shows. That's my job. It sounds interesting when I describe it to people at parties. They think I'm bragging, but I'm not. It's just what I do. In actual fact, I hate it.
It's true that I don't hate it as much as a whole load of other jobs I could be doing instead, and that's why I still do it. I'd hate being an accountant more, I imagine. The day to day of it is quite nice. I hang around with interesting people, and I don't have to do much. I get in late, and leave early, and go for long lunches with wine, sometimes. The stupid ideas that come into my head from time to time are considered decent enough to ensure that just by sharing them with others, I stay in employment. But that's accidental more than anything else. To me, it's like breathing. Bob Dylan once said that about touring as an explanation of why he did it--he said he was driven to do it, like breathing. I don't mean it like that. I simply mean that it's something I do without even thinking about it. It just happens. And it's not something I can switch off. "I try not to congratulate myself for it too much. Sure, it seems I'm doing OK at it, and I do work at it sometimes. But in truth, it's just there whether I like it or not. And some people happen to pay me for it. It'd be there even if they didn't.
One of the stupidest things about working in TV is the way many people build it up. They like to sound like experts. They devote their lives to it, and specialise in a particular style or genre. So usually they can't understand how someone might have worked in factual programming one year, and entertainment programming the next. Even 'factual entertainment' is a category of its own, separate from either of its constituent genres. Yet nobody can properly tell you what factual actually is, or what entertainment is. These words have come to mean nothing. For example, it might amuse you to know that I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here is produced by the factual department of the company that makes it.
More depressing, though, it the lack of concern among those of us who make television. I know I make shit TV. And it certainly does bother me. Can you imagine a surgeon saying, "I love it when people say I'm doing shit heart bypasses"? Or a teacher congratulating himself on teaching rubbish to children?
There's certainly an appetite for shit TV. Viewers lap it up. That's why nobody's heard of anything on BBC4 and everybody's heard of (Celebrity) Love Island. How we can change that, I just don't know. But I don't love the situation as it is.
Natalka Znak, controller of factual entertainment at Granada
I develop programme ideas for new TV shows. That's my job. It sounds interesting when I describe it to people at parties. They think I'm bragging, but I'm not. It's just what I do. In actual fact, I hate it.
It's true that I don't hate it as much as a whole load of other jobs I could be doing instead, and that's why I still do it. I'd hate being an accountant more, I imagine. The day to day of it is quite nice. I hang around with interesting people, and I don't have to do much. I get in late, and leave early, and go for long lunches with wine, sometimes. The stupid ideas that come into my head from time to time are considered decent enough to ensure that just by sharing them with others, I stay in employment. But that's accidental more than anything else. To me, it's like breathing. Bob Dylan once said that about touring as an explanation of why he did it--he said he was driven to do it, like breathing. I don't mean it like that. I simply mean that it's something I do without even thinking about it. It just happens. And it's not something I can switch off. "I try not to congratulate myself for it too much. Sure, it seems I'm doing OK at it, and I do work at it sometimes. But in truth, it's just there whether I like it or not. And some people happen to pay me for it. It'd be there even if they didn't.
One of the stupidest things about working in TV is the way many people build it up. They like to sound like experts. They devote their lives to it, and specialise in a particular style or genre. So usually they can't understand how someone might have worked in factual programming one year, and entertainment programming the next. Even 'factual entertainment' is a category of its own, separate from either of its constituent genres. Yet nobody can properly tell you what factual actually is, or what entertainment is. These words have come to mean nothing. For example, it might amuse you to know that I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here is produced by the factual department of the company that makes it.
More depressing, though, it the lack of concern among those of us who make television. I know I make shit TV. And it certainly does bother me. Can you imagine a surgeon saying, "I love it when people say I'm doing shit heart bypasses"? Or a teacher congratulating himself on teaching rubbish to children?
There's certainly an appetite for shit TV. Viewers lap it up. That's why nobody's heard of anything on BBC4 and everybody's heard of (Celebrity) Love Island. How we can change that, I just don't know. But I don't love the situation as it is.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Here's the science bit...
The TV industry (for that's all it is--it's certainly not a profession) has developed a whole new set of meanings for commonly used English words. And because everyone watches TV, these new meanings take root in every day language with startling ease. Take for example the word 'science', which you might have thought, were it not for TV, has something to do with the acquiring of knowledge through continual testing, re-testing, and analysing of results; something to do with demonstrable, provable facts; something to do with curing cancer, making spaceships fly, or developing new kinds of vacuum cleaners.
But to us TV folk science means something else. It means cascading mists of dry ice, men with thick rimmed glasses, and lots of dickens about with dangerous or brightly colored fluids. Enter Heston Blumenthal and his program's on BBC last night, "In Search of Perfection". From the title, you might be forgiven for thinking the program's was some sort of neo Nazi documentary about eugenics. But to do so you'd have to have missed the tie in free promotional DVD and write ups in The Times which in fact would have told you that Heston (how come I've never met a man called Hesten in real life?) is a cook. Or a chef, if you're into the hierarchy of the kitchen. Or a Scientist, if you are a TV person.
This guy is famous for his 'scientific' approach to cooking (cheffing?). But because this is TV, all that really means is that he uses beakers and glass rods instead of pans and wooden spoons. Oh, and rather than pop something in the fridge, he'll get out a thermos of liquid nitrogen, which creates a visually appealing curtain of heavy, cold mist, instantly turning him into a gastronomic alchemist or something.
While the programme was mildly fun for a few minutes, and only when PVRed to allow one to forward through the dull location bits where he met the pigs he was about to turn into sausages (how very postmodern and trendy), all it really did was confirm to anyone who mightn't have known already that TV cookery programmes have fuck all to do with cooking. Anyone who harps on about how you can't follow a recipe off the TV and make it in your home any more has clearly been in a coma for the last 10 years, and has missed the fact that food TV is simply very low grade porn for a nation that's now more obsessed with getting fat than getting laid.
We watched as Heston sought out the best kind of treacle for making treacle tart, even going so far as to boil up his own. Scientifically. How annoying, then, that he discovered that nothing worked quite as well as simple, shop bought golden syrup. I was only surprised he didn't run some tests to see how much gold there actually was in the stuff, and maybe make a jar of his own by melting down his wife's wedding ring. Before that, he made the 'perfect' bangers and mash by actually creating sausages from scratch (using an actual pig), then poaching them and pan frying them to brown them off. In all this, he somehow missed the crucial point that nobody else would consider his recipe perfect simply because it involves two lab assistants, dirtying every pan you own (and some you'd have to borrow from a school chemistry lab), and about three days work. Hardly convenience food. Let's not even discuss the icecream recipe that contained no eggs but plenty of dry ice (at minmus 180 degrees), smashed up with a huge rolling pin and several towels (why keep your mess in the kitchen? Get the bathroom all messed up too!).
For TV people, science is simply a way to make what we say True and Right. There's no need to merely suggest it or actually explain it, because instead we can assert its truth simply by getting a man in a white coat and boffin glasses to say it, while he pours chemicals from one tube into another. In an ideal world, we'll light the wall behind him with a green or blue wash (green is for evil-science, blue is for cold and simple fact-science. There is no good science as such, so there's no colour for it). But that's only if there's the money in the budget for specialist lighting, or if the runner could find a gel to put over the lights he blagged from the facilities department on the day of the shoot.
But to us TV folk science means something else. It means cascading mists of dry ice, men with thick rimmed glasses, and lots of dickens about with dangerous or brightly colored fluids. Enter Heston Blumenthal and his program's on BBC last night, "In Search of Perfection". From the title, you might be forgiven for thinking the program's was some sort of neo Nazi documentary about eugenics. But to do so you'd have to have missed the tie in free promotional DVD and write ups in The Times which in fact would have told you that Heston (how come I've never met a man called Hesten in real life?) is a cook. Or a chef, if you're into the hierarchy of the kitchen. Or a Scientist, if you are a TV person.
This guy is famous for his 'scientific' approach to cooking (cheffing?). But because this is TV, all that really means is that he uses beakers and glass rods instead of pans and wooden spoons. Oh, and rather than pop something in the fridge, he'll get out a thermos of liquid nitrogen, which creates a visually appealing curtain of heavy, cold mist, instantly turning him into a gastronomic alchemist or something.
While the programme was mildly fun for a few minutes, and only when PVRed to allow one to forward through the dull location bits where he met the pigs he was about to turn into sausages (how very postmodern and trendy), all it really did was confirm to anyone who mightn't have known already that TV cookery programmes have fuck all to do with cooking. Anyone who harps on about how you can't follow a recipe off the TV and make it in your home any more has clearly been in a coma for the last 10 years, and has missed the fact that food TV is simply very low grade porn for a nation that's now more obsessed with getting fat than getting laid.
We watched as Heston sought out the best kind of treacle for making treacle tart, even going so far as to boil up his own. Scientifically. How annoying, then, that he discovered that nothing worked quite as well as simple, shop bought golden syrup. I was only surprised he didn't run some tests to see how much gold there actually was in the stuff, and maybe make a jar of his own by melting down his wife's wedding ring. Before that, he made the 'perfect' bangers and mash by actually creating sausages from scratch (using an actual pig), then poaching them and pan frying them to brown them off. In all this, he somehow missed the crucial point that nobody else would consider his recipe perfect simply because it involves two lab assistants, dirtying every pan you own (and some you'd have to borrow from a school chemistry lab), and about three days work. Hardly convenience food. Let's not even discuss the icecream recipe that contained no eggs but plenty of dry ice (at minmus 180 degrees), smashed up with a huge rolling pin and several towels (why keep your mess in the kitchen? Get the bathroom all messed up too!).
For TV people, science is simply a way to make what we say True and Right. There's no need to merely suggest it or actually explain it, because instead we can assert its truth simply by getting a man in a white coat and boffin glasses to say it, while he pours chemicals from one tube into another. In an ideal world, we'll light the wall behind him with a green or blue wash (green is for evil-science, blue is for cold and simple fact-science. There is no good science as such, so there's no colour for it). But that's only if there's the money in the budget for specialist lighting, or if the runner could find a gel to put over the lights he blagged from the facilities department on the day of the shoot.
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