‘TAKE A CHILL PILL, JARMIN!’
Written March 2001, Adapted and Edited October 2023
They say people get mellower as the years go by. Well, for me, I would argue the opposite is true. I originally wrote this piece two decades ago, it is about my feelings towards the way commercialisation has influenced television. Over the last 20 or so years, things have gradually got worse, rather than better, in my opinion. I shall be updating this blog to reflect the current year, 2023.
Television! I do not know why I have one in the first place! Far from being relaxing, it stresses me out. My better half has threatened to take my blood pressure whenever the adverts come on. To alleviate my stress, we have invested in a YouView Box. This has all the functions of a SkyPlus Box, the main one, for me, being that you can pause and rewind live television, but it comes with just a one-off cost rather than a subscription fee. This means we can skip through all the commercials and watch the programmes that interest us, as and when we like.
I am not so much against the programme content, as there are excellent examples on ‘the box’ but it is like digging in a skip to find a gold ring. I consider British drama, including the soaps, to be the finest in the world, which provides the viewer with sharp observational humour and tackles serious issues with sensitivity and realism. Jimmy McGovern, Phil Redman, Linda La Plant, Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh, and Ken Loach are the best in the business involved within this genre. Unfortunately, quality drama costs money to make…
The serious documentary is another thing us Brits do brilliantly. Take, for example, BBC’s Omnibus and Channel 4’s Dispatches, which look at the arts and current affairs. These series give the viewer an in-depth analysis of the subjects covered, leaving you well informed at the end of each episode. An annoying thing with this format nowadays is the amount of actual television you get for your airtime. I understand broadcasters need to hold the viewers’ attention by giving tasters as to what is to come at the beginning of the programme and before the commercial breaks. These are clever ways to stop us from grabbing the remote control and channel hopping during the breaks. We do have shorter attention spans due to the hectic lives we now live, much busier than before. However, if the decision makers commission strong interesting content, surely this will hold our attention without the need for the aforementioned ‘tricks of the trade.’
I made a further observation back in 2001. News programmes are something of a commodity, with which the commissioners keep viewers tuned into that channel. Rather than informing us of the day’s world events, we now have trailers for the upcoming news during the advertisement break immediately preceding the news programme. Broadcasters appear to focus on stories from angles that excite us, above everything else. I shall be discussing this issue in a future blog.
One more thing! Every commercial station has viewer competitions to win massive prizes. Fair enough, I get that commercial media companies must raise funds from whatever source they can, especially with the vast number of channels that are available in 2023. However, rather than a larger number of winners receiving a prize of significant, but smaller, value, just one person wins an inordinately huge monetary prize.
‘LIFE’S A CAT’
September 2000, adapted March 2001 and edited October 2023
Society and life, what is it all about?
Who knows? What do I know? What do I care?
Where are the answers?
On the television, in a book, or on the net?
The first, more channels than hot dinners,
With the nourishment of a McDonald’s.
The second, “only ten percent of Americans reads them”*
The third, more ways to tempt us to spend!
*Quote from a song entitled ‘Television Drug of a Nation,’ by ‘The Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy’’, 1992.
I blame Maggie Thatcher’s ‘1990 Broadcasting Act’ for initiating the dumbing down of our television and radio.’ To quote Wikipedia: “The Broadcasting Act 1990 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which aimed to liberalise and deregulate the British broadcasting industry by promoting competition. It led directly to the abolition of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and its replacement with the Independent Television Commission and Radio Authority (both themselves now replaced by Ofcom), which were given the task of regulating the broadcasting industry with weaker powers compared to the previous authority”.
In 1992, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song ‘Fifty-Seven Channels and Nothing On’. He could not have summed things up more succinctly. However, as I hinted earlier, there are many positives in the new age of technology in which we live. Social media, despite all the advertising, (another bugbear of mine), is an opportunity for the average person in the street to tell our stories to a mass audience. Smartphones have cameras that can record content that the narrator can easily upload to the internet. It is a case of defining ourselves with the tools we have, rather than passively digesting the information we are bombarded with each day.
Now. go ahead and get creating!
In my next blog, I shall be discussing commercialisation in popular music. As well as my snobbery with this creative genre…
Jarmin Apple
October 2023
"Drop-in and Chill Out" 