Through the Looking Glass

I meant to write about this last year when it was first on, but... well...

We have to talk.

I mean I've left TV to it's own devices recently. The break-up was fairly amicable. I've been spending more time with the Xbox anyway, and every time I tried to catch up with TV, it started screaming at me about people I'd never heard of, playing terrible music at all hours and asking if I wanted to borrow any money. And to be honest, the sex was better elsewhere (*ahem*). It hadn't been the same since I was a teenager, and on the few occasions I could bring myself to turn it on, there was nothing there. The magic had gone.

Wanking metaphors aside, there is something genuinely disconcerting about Gogglebox. It's like someone sat a TV executive in front of news reports about privacy concerns surrounding the new Kinect and unease in the public mind towards the rise of so-called reality TV, and then followed it up with a viewing of Orwell's 1984; then lobotomised them and gave them a piece of paper and a crayon.

The resulting scrawl would doubtlessly have spelled out the show's central premise: Watching people while they're watching TV. That's it Britain, that's your cultural lot. You've gone from Elgar and Richard Curtis to staring slack jawed at someone staring slack jawed back at you. It's like chatroulette without the random stranger nudity, although I'm sure Channel 5 are already working out how to (A) get around that and (B) involve Keith Chegwin.

I mean it's just... It's fucking stupid, alright? TV is an inherently non-interactive medium, and nothing brings it home like this. Staring at people staring at a TV. Does it fulfil some voyeuristic longing to see into the lives of other, so called 'normal' people? Is it because most people sort of suspect that they're not normal, and want a yardstick to measure themselves and their opinions against? Are we just nosey sods?

Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to tune in to this week's episode, but I suspect I've been able to replicate the experience by sticking a mirror in the corner of the room, facing me. Oh look, he's typing on his laptop. Now he's picking his nose. Now he's wailing in abject despair at man's desperate, clawing need to consume inane drivel to fill the void modern life has torn from them. Hilarious!

Of Berries, Brothers and Bad TV

This post is based on a draft that has been lying around for a while. In fact it's been more than a year. It's not very often I get to start a blog with "I was talking to a celebrity, last night..." and unfortunately I've missed that opportunity spectacularly. However, the fact remains I did speak to a celebrity, so I'm going to milk it for all it's worth. The anecdote that is, not the celebrity. Oh god, this is all going wrong already... I was talking a number of months (more like two years) ago with the most excellent Mr Matt Berry (he of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Snuff Box and the IT Crowd) about... well, whatever you fill the time with when talking to someone who's been professionally able to fire a Glock at an army of floating stationery. Part of the Winchester Film Festival and at the time I was lucky enough to be part of the backstage entourage, so headed off to the local to keep him entertained. And the conversation came round to the youth of today, and the lack of rebellion and originality in young TV writers. Does he have a point? Of course he does, he's famous. And TV is generally terrible. Even when something new and ground-breaking (or at least breaking old ground everyone else had forgotten) comes along, it's generally a month or so before every other network is scrambling to release their own rehash of it. For every Lost, there's a Flash Forward; for every Heroes there's an Alphas. And with these rehashes comes the armies of content control people, milking down any of the originality that might have dared poke it's head out. Applying stock characters on top of overdone plots in locations we're sick of seeing, they manage to amplify the mysteries at the core of the show's pitch only in so far as to make it look like nobody on the show has any idea what they're doing. Look at Big Brother. Endemol's original Channel 4 pitch was interesting mostly because it was an experiment. Stick these unknown people in a house, set them challenges and watch the little humans scurry around their little ant farm. Look, that one just done a poo, delightful. It was exactly as promising as a date with George Osbourne. And yet the utterly unexpected happened with it. We got riveting, Machiavellian evil at the hands of 'Nasty' Nick Bateman, voyeuristically revelling in every backstab and whispered accusation; right up to his surprisingly panto-free exit to genuine hatred. We had the "won't they / won't they" drama of Tom (looking like a sad version of Jack from Lost) and Anna (looking like everyone wishes all Lesbians looked). We got Craig sleeping his way through half the competition, emerging to a surprise win and donating it to a secret disabled relative who needed lifesaving surgery - that miraculously he hadn't even been milking in the press. And it all came through Endemol releasing the reigns and taking a chance. Seeing what happens. Now, Big Brother has descended into a kind of day-release program in which the real world is spared the presence of it's worst inhabitants so we can safely gawk at them from behind a TV screen. The same characters go in and have the same arguments over the same things because the content control people have stepped in and driven it into the pit of ADHD, where only ideas that have previously been proven to work are safe for the audience of ravenous plebs that await it. I'm sick of it and I wish the show would just die, except being on Channel 5 is a much worse punishment. Now, Reality TV has become one of those dirty but inexplicably common phrases, like 'Back Sack and Crack' or 'The Conservatives.' It's gone too far to take it back - Real people wouldn't trust Reality TV any more because they know there's not going to be anything new or interesting, just the same ideas rehashed to death. Maybe this is what's holding back the next generation of writers: there are no more Monty Pythons or Young Ones to inspire them to anarchy. Or as Matt Berry put it, "Stop ranting and get me another drink."

Britain's got Chlamidia

Britain's got history. Britain's got an inescapable charm that makes tourists gloss over the chavs, late trains and cost of everything. And according to the Health Protection Agency, nearly 10% of Britain's got Chlamydia. But judging by the recurring nightmare of weekend TV, one thing I would be reluctant to say Britain has got, is talent. At this point I'd love to run through a list of the opening acts from last weekend; highlighting which ones shone, which ones burned the skin from my eardrums and which ones had suspiciously tear-jerking backstories. But the problem is, I just don't want to. I've seen enough Big Brothers, X-Factors and Fame Academies to realise that sitting down to watch another one would be like tracking down a previous mugger and offering him a hammer. And then telling him he's got gay shoes. All these shows do is highlight the reason we have celebrities, actors and rockstars instead of listening to the guy down the street with the guitar - your average, common or garden citizen is boring as shit. Actually I take that back - judging by a few episodes of CSI and Bones in which lumps of shit were used to extract vital forensic clues, shit is at least interesting enough to write an episode centering around it. Whereas judging by the steady stream of nonentities pouring out of reality TV these days, average people are the precise demographic the production companies fail to attract. After all, I often find myself sitting in a pub surrounded by tables full of normal people, and while I don't want to go over and engage them in idle chit chat, I don't want to punch them in the face until one of us starts bleeding either. Unless of course, they're one of those people. The ones who are either talking loudly about nothing or "amusing" their "friends" with their "wacky antics." In other words, your average reality TV participant. Admittedly, there's something voyeuristically satisfying about locking them all in together somewhere and watching them annoy each other instead of us, but without dropping weapons and exacerbating grafitti into the arena (as I dream of someday being able to call it), I just don't see the point. Anyway, you'll have to excuse me for now. There's a man with a hammer at my door again, nodding suggestively at the bloodstained meat-tenderiser in his fist.