What with recuperating after my hip operation and all, I’ve been watching an unusual amount of television lately and have come to the conclusion that society is going to hell in a handcart.
What passes for popular entertainment these days is sensationalist dross, pandering to the basest instincts of the public.
Ironically, television presenters warn us that certain visuals accompanying genuine news items “may be upsetting”. What constitutes ‘family viewing’ now that the nine o’clock watershed is long gone, a multiplicity of channels available and most homes have more than one means of access to them?
If you ask me, it’s all been downhill since the groundbreaking first series of ‘Big Brother’ which put an amorphous collection of people together in isolation and waited for the fireworks to begin. It was a coldly calculated formula promising spectacular ratings and has been a roaring success since in various iterations from ‘Love Island’ to ‘I’m a Celebrity’ and ‘The Apprentice’.
The ingredients are the same, only the locations and circumstances change and the formula tweaked to prove ever more challenging. Inevitably, tensions grow, minor problems are magnified, personalities clash, tasks and trials test the mettle of the participants who, one by one at the whim of the public, are ejected into the real world to brief notoriety, rapid obscurity and subsequent tales in the tabloids of how the experience damaged them. If it were a scientific experiment conducted in a laboratory with live rats, it would be banned.
On ‘Love Island’ the moral tone sinks to rock bottom (no pun intended.) A semi-naked paradise for the vain and vacuous young of both sexes, its only criteria for participation perfect features, a sculpted body, an even tan, a talent for banal conversation – and for the viewer, pure voyeurism, as we see them play childish games, flirt, pair off and establish tenuous relationships.
This idyllic applecart is soon upset by the metered arrival of fresh castaways. Cue tension, female jealousies, male rivalries, inevitable showdowns and tears that never seem to dislodge a single false eyelash. Despite consolation liberally dispensed to the emotionally wounded, it’s every man and woman for themselves. I have it on the best of authority that discussion of this series is rife among Primary Sixes and Sevens in the playground. How edifying for them to witness the dangerous playing with emotions and see women passed around like parcels in this age of feminism.
‘The Apprentice’ features hard-faced young hopefuls Teflon-coated in confidence, setting out their prospective stalls before the basilisk stare of Alan Sugar, a charm free streetfighting entrepreneur who rolls out their inadequacies. Fiercely competitive, manipulative and ready to skin their own grandmothers, they’re willing to be humiliated before the nation for the chance of working for a tyrant. Do we take vicarious delight in seeing the cockiest among them shown the door and even the toughest crumble? Yes, we do. What edifying stuff……
As for ‘I’m a Celebrity’, which as a Derry Girl, I only watched to see how ‘our Nadine’ conducted herself under severe stress, what a sadistic series, masquerading as a social experiment. It had every degree of barbaric unpleasantness verging on torture, guaranteed to revolt viewers – yet we lapped it up and like the ancient Romans in the Coliseum, voted thumbs up or thumbs down to decide who’d survive.
So-called ‘family entertainment’ seems to have become savagely competitive – the ‘X Factor’, ‘The Voice’, ‘Bake Off’, even my newly-compulsive ‘Strictly’. Someone’s gain means other’s pain. How one hankers for dear old Bruce Forsyth, his spoof games and conveyor-belt of prizes – “fondue set, Teasmade, cuddly toy…” And speaking of ‘Strictly’, the screaming/sobbing/hugging response to success or failure has spread to the ballroom floor. Please stop. Nobody’s died.
We live in a loud, aggressive, mannerless society, increasingly emotionally incontinent, devoid of dignity and decent restraint and our entertainment choices reflect it. And we’ve achieved the ultimate inanity, the absolute nadir of popular viewing, in ‘Gogglebox’ – a series that puts people watching television on television for the rest of us to watch. Truly, the end of days……
