Feeding sheep to the lions

After a certain age, winter becomes that time when anyone interested in the media as a reflection of our culture turns to afternoon and early evening telly. It never fails to be a depressing disappointment.

Round our ‘ouse, we have the full banana as far as potential telly is concerned – up to but not including Channel Murdoch. We have Freeview and Freesat, which adds up net to over 400 choices. Of these – as the installer in France put it – “100 are God, 150 are necklaces, 50 are porn, 80 are news, 80 are silly sport, 6 are history, 2 are quite good, and the rest are unwatchable”.

In no other sphere has the Thatcherite mantra about choice been shown up as quite so empty as in our televisual options today. Poor old Andrew Landsend is still wittering about choice in the NHS, but the real choice there is between being ill and getting cured. The same sort of thing is true of television: the only ability to choose that counts is for informative, funny, and exciting over crap.

The particular genre I want to focus on today – am I the only one who sees the word ‘genre’ as useful only for librarians? – is what I understand the bright young berks call Reality Lifestyle. Like most contemporary nomenclature, the term is inaccurate, being used to describe unreal lives devoid of any style whatsoever. The favourites at the minute are dining, lazy dirty families and bus-trips, but it really doesn’t matter, because the format is always the same: half a dozen people are put together in a social situation, in which they will display all their worst traits while a smart-arsed voice-over is rude about all of them.

The sad thing is that some of it is addictive in the same way that watching an unsuited couple row in a pub is irresistible: they start off hissing under their breath, until one of them snaps, drinks are thrown, chairs knocked back, and regrettable opinions expressed. It’s great fun – if you’re not that couple.

The overriding impression given by these programmes is one of cruelty, condescension and bedlam. The last may puzzle a few readers, so let me explain. In 18th century London, it was the custom for brainless dandies to take their friends down to the viewing window of an infamous lunatic asylum (Bedlam) and laugh at the antics of the inmates. For me, the validity of the parallel is merely a symptom of the fact that, as a culture, we are heading unstoppably back towards those days when people threw rotten eggs at the Village Idiot ‘for fun’. I knew this for certain when I read a piece in the Spectator a few years back (a magazine going downhill faster than most) about depressives, in which they were referred to as The Glums.

Most of the misfits filmed in Come Dine with Me, for example, have personality problems so obvious within seconds that a foreigner might be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled upon an intelligent programme about situational psychiatric research. Until, that is, the VO pops up to stick an ice-pick into the spotlit victim at the vital moment. It’s a bit like bull fighting, but without the copiously messy blood spurting everywhere. A playground rhyme I never adhered to is ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’. In 2012, I’d change it to ‘The toreador’s sword may fail to sever my jugular, but bullying will give me 50 years of nightmares’. Orwell’s invention of Room 101 was his greatest.

One very curious thing for me about our society is that we have all these quasi-legal sensitivities about what we can or cannot say to or about anyone, but the gratuitous nastiness and childish victimisation apparent in everyday life is worse than I can ever remember. During the 1950s, people’s voices trailed away when talking about, say, homosexuality or autism (both were seen as forms of madness) but was that I wonder any worse than making TV programmes in which ritualised humiliation of obsessive compulsive disorder is part of the entertainment package?

Television is, and I suspect always will be – whatever hybrid form it winds up in – the most all-pervasive and persuasive medium in human history. The internet in its current form doesn’t get close: I ignore most of the ads, reject almost all the bloggers as yelling onanists, and abhor nearly all site layout as rank bad design. The architecture and navigation of most application pages strikes me as the work of a truculent four year-old with a grudge against authority. And while the web is more interactive (and thus better for the brain) than TV,  nothing can beat a brilliantly-argued documentary or heart-tugging wildlife feature on the telly for inspiring the best human instincts. Its propagandic ability to bring out the worst side of us is, without doubt, something that should always frighten and guide us: I sometime shudder at what the Nazis might have achieved over the long term with HD wide-screen colour television and modern direction techniques.

But more dangerous and destructive than any spin is the braindead programme inventor whose concept is sub-consciously nihilistic in relation to civilisation. Reality Lifestyle bollocks allows the impressionable young mind to sit passively as a persuasive format suggests – with ellipitical cunning – that it’s normal to set up a vulnerable person for an amusing but traumatic public experience.

The unfathomably ghastly Jeremy Hunt mouths another great Thatcher-era soundbite: plurality. I’m all for plurality wherein rubbish television is available for the drones, and on other channels are engaging and/or amusing programmes deconstructing them for those of us whose knuckles don’t leave a trail in the fitted carpet. Unfortunately, Murdochian plurality would’ve meant nothing more than double standards: a tits channel with naked darts (waydergo, Kelvin luv) alongside a channel condemning the monstrously licentious nature of Leftist sexual mores. A sort of televised Daily Mail in many ways.

What comes next in this parade of peroxide personality defects, we wonder: ‘I’m a transvestite haemophiliac agrophobic lamb, get me out of the amphitheatre and take those lions away’? As always, the answer to that lies with us.