“Look
If you had one shot
To sit on your lazy butt
And watch all the TV you ever wanted
Until your brain turned to mush
Would you ever go for it?
Or just let it slip?”
~ ‘Couch Potato’, lyrics by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic
from his album “Poodle Hat”, 2003
Here we mercifully arrive at the end of our journey of a day of TV (the first parts of which are chronicled in part 1 & part 2), and thank goodness for that. By the time the evening shuffled around, I’d spent the best part of 12 hours absorbing the various contributions the TV networks chose to throw my way one quiet day. It was getting a little desperate now: I longed to switch off, having well and truly had my fill for the day. I’m positive my eyes had a certain blood-shot, bug-eyed quality to them by now, which was causing the children to look at me warily. I may have even been drooling and babbling a little, but we’ll keep that just between ourselves.
Masterchef (Ch 10) was on. I do rather like Masterchef, mainly to ogle the food I’ll never eat, much less prepare. Food with names in French or Italian where you need to put on the correct accent in order for it to sound important. It’s a bit tough to believe these folks are amateurs when considering their skills and knowledge. Clearly there are more than a few folks out there eating much more complex fare than the traditional meat and three veg.
Masterchef, like most other “reality” programs, is quite simply not a reasonable representation of any kind of reality that I’m familiar with. It is a collection of ridiculously contrived scenarios played out by contestants specifically selected to add drama and hopefully a few fiery conflicts, perhaps even a few tears in the name of human interest. They are labouriously placed under a microscope and examined like a curious bug with its legs pulled off, to a soundtrack of appropriately dramatic music (the chka-chka-chka of maracas favoured by The Biggest Loser (Ch10) at moments of high tension are a personal favourite - listen for them if you ever get a chance).
Time: 2000 hours
Number of times my bug eyes fell out of my head: 73
Number of times I considered leaving them hanging out just for fun: 73
What bugs me to distraction about all of these reality programs are the overwrought descriptions they give themselves and their contestants. Let’s get a few things straight. They are not on a journey. They are not fighting/singing/dancing/cooking/renovating for their lives, as if they are taken to the alley out the back of the studio and euthanised after the show. This is not the end of their dreams (come to think of it, if these people have so much of what they frequently describe as “passion” for what they are doing on these shows, why on Earth do they need to go on TV to realise their “dreams”?). What it boils down to is that they are contestants on a game show. The show may have an obscene budget, massive sets, overblown scripts and charismatic characters as hosts and judges, but they are not more than game shows that will be swallowed and digested and eventually passed and forgotten by the viewing public in the fullness of time. Is a little perspective too much to ask?
I finished the day much as I started it, in bed watching the small TV with Wonder Woman at my side. We watched a few of the American serials that she enjoys. It could have been Bones (Ch 7), NCIS/NCIS LA (Ch 10), or The Mentalist (Ch 9), but to be entirely frank, I was beyond concentrating on them. Perhaps the day’s activities had taken enough of a toll and flattened my ability to digest what I was watching, not that it takes much effort to take in their banal content. It is the conundrum of these shows that in order to consistently create the drama their stories rely on, they need to escalate the scenarios their characters experience to increasingly ludicrous and unbelievable levels. This means they usually reach the point where considerable plot holes are whizzed past with alarming regularity without so much as a supposedly intelligent character calling a halt to proceedings and introducing a modicum of sense. These programs are just too fast and loose in their writing for me to truly enjoy them. I guess I always have The West Wing on DVD when the despair at the current state of TV offends my sensibilities past the point of coping.
Time: 2130 hours
Hours spent watching TV so far today that I simply will never get back: 14
Number of times I will repeat today’s experience in the future: 0
It’s interesting to note that as of now, the On Writing Blog contains more words about TV than any other topic that it has considered. This is at worst an indictment, at best a little sad. TV is so pervasive in our lives, but, I’m happy to say, we really don’t need to continue to draw from this well and sup from its meagre offerings. Switch it off. Put on a great movie instead. Listen to the radio, or some CDs. Or even enjoy a little reflective silence. We may all be better for it.
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