Just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?
Well let’s face it, looking over the television news today, we may as well considering what’s going on up in those ivory towers and what experts are telling us about the effects of television.
We have premium phone line scandals, too much violence in soaps, racism on reality TV, too much television being bad for children and HolbyBlue starting in couple of weeks. I mean, what’s that about?
But…
It’s too easy to blame everything on television. Take last night’s Panorama. Aside from it being a badly made documentary at a technical level – just look at the bloody camera and speak, don’t wave the damn thing around and cut to about 20 different angles – it was just painfully out of line when it came to Blue Peter. Okay, if Opera is investigated and proved to have been defrauding GMTV and its viewers out of thousands, even millions of pounds, then fair enough. Nail ‘em! But to treat Blue Peter editor Richard Marson like some dreadful criminal for one single error made in the spur of the moment during a live TV show – probably not even made by him – was, quite frankly, shocking. Or perhaps Blue Peter was the fall guy to fulfil some public service remit to allow Panorama to go for the jugular on the likes of Richard and Judy and GMTV. Either way, it was still wrong.
And as for the assertion that TV should be rationed to children, we’ve heard it all before. In fact, we’ve written about it before, specifically in relation to previous warblings by Dr Aric Sigman who is back once again to bang on about it some more. I’d like to ask Dr Sigman how much television he watches, and have this image of him sitting eating a pot noodle, glued to the Hollyoaks omnibus. We can but hope – it would certainly make me feel better about my own viewing levels.
I actually think that some of what Dr Sigman says on this subject is quite sensible – no child should have a TV in their bedroom until they are the age where they can police their own viewing. But come on, Dr S, change the record, eh?
And then we have too much violence in soaps. Do we? I watched Emmerdale, EastEnders and Coronation Street last night and not one hint of violence raised its head.
An Emmerdale storyline surrounding a kidnapping and featuring a shooting brought 37 complaints to Ofcom that the sequences were too violent. This was against an audience of around 8.5 million. This works out at 0.000435 per cent of the total audience finding the scenes too violent. I’m not saying that portion of the audience’s opinions and concerns should be ignored, but it is worth putting things into perspective.
Finally, we have HolbyBlue. And on the basis of the preview disc that’s currently sitting in my DVD player, this has me bang to rights. Television is in an irrevocable state of terminal decline. After 50 minutes of this, I think I will switch off my television set and go and do something less boring instead.
Coming Soon – HolbyBlue: The First Look. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
People lead slick, boring lives. We used to watch soaps because we cared about the characters, or we wanted social issues (like the very excellent Brookside in the 1980s). Now people switch on because they love fictional torment, blood, gore, hatred. It livens up their slick and shiny lives. It worries me.