MEDIOCRE MEDIA IN THE UK

THE SCOURGE OF INDEPENDENT THINKING

BY AMITS

Are we such a lot of unthinking automatons nowadays that we don’t warrant being challenged by this country’s broadcasters and publishers? You could be forgiven for thinking so, given the levels of complete and utter rubbish that gushes daily from our televisions and radios purporting to be new and informative.

How ironic, that in an age where the nation’s children are being continually challenged to develop their skills and their thinking, that the adult population is expected to blindly accept any load of old media produced garbage without the need to scrutinize or question its use, quality or authenticity.

Quality television which was once synonymous with our main broadcaster’s, now seems to have been largely replaced by cheap and tacky telly, notably in the form of “reality” TV shows, which are slowly beginning to dominate peak time schedules and require little in the way of intelligent thinking to understand them. Even the good old BBC has found itself jumping on this reality bandwagon, filling its channels with jaw-droppingly bad, song and dance programs which do the corporation little if any credit.  

News programs, which are primarily designed to inform the public about important events, are now regularly contaminated with spurious reports, theories, gossip and opinions that are themselves often untested, highly debatable and probably of very little interest to the man in the street. The BBC’s flagship “Breakfast” show has now become nothing more than a living magazine in its own right, presented by wannabe minor celebrities who are perhaps better known as reality show contestants or have made the odd cameo appearance on one of the BBC’s own comedy shows.

Recently, news-seekers had to endure the grim spectacle of both a sport’s and weather presenter teetering around an ice-rink as they tried to perform some or other dance routine, for some or other good cause, of which there seem to be an ever increasing number. When did news programs suddenly become some form of lightweight entertainment for the masses, which sends the country off to work, safe in the knowledge that Carol Kirkwood didn’t fall on the ice and bruise her backside.

Our nationally funded broadcaster is now so busy telling us about their new digital services and in-house internet provisions that we could be forgiven for thinking that the BBC has suddenly gone completely commercial and will no longer be an unreasonable burden to the hapless licence fee payers of this country. No such luck there though, the BBC apparently need more money from the licence payers, so that they can provide the country with even more of the same old dross, but at a much more expensive rate.            

It should be no surprise then that people are completely switched off and uninformed about the vitally important events that affect their daily lives, that they are more interested in what’s happening in Albert Square than what’s going on down their own street. Vegetables thrive when they’re buried in crap and our national broadcasters seem to have a limitless supply of the nasty stuff to feed us, so the future looks extremely bleak for those people who believe they have an IQ higher than a carrot.

What is staggering is that so many people become engaged with these so-called reality TV shows, which are in fact are nothing like real life, but a series of heavily staged incidents or demands which seem primarily designed to demean and diminish the rather sad people who have chosen to subject themselves to public ridicule. These are the very same sort of people that 500 years ago, would have volunteered to be put in the public stocks and accept any sort of humiliation, just so long as people remembered their names.   

Fortunately for us, given its non-visual format UK radio has remained relatively untarnished by the new “reality” approach which has been imposed on millions of television viewers. That said, it should not be supposed that standards within this particular medium are something for the country to boast about. It seems to be almost habitual nowadays for national talk shows to regularly engage the services of a small number of former disgruntled public servants, rambling self-publicists or Z-list celebrities, whose qualification for commenting on the specific subject is often highly tenuous and occasionally non-existent.

Added to the list of these so-called “experts” and their unrelated preambles, as to why they are right and everyone else is wrong, we have the almost compulsory phone-in feature, which nowadays seems to allow every lunatic and fringe group in the country to have their say on national radio. It is not unusual today for an important debate to be misdirected or hijacked by an individual who has their own particular agenda to follow and is commonly allowed to stifle any sort of discussion, simply by shouting louder than anyone else.

An increasingly irritating feature of both these mediums is the appearance of some desperate celebrity who does the rounds of all the main TV and Radio shows in an attempt to flog us their latest book, record or film. Why they imagine that the listener would have any real interest in the lives of these generally over-exposed and over-paid individuals is often a mystery and a matter of complete indifference to the wider radio audience.

The written word as a medium has perhaps changed the least and is subject to a greater level of choice than the other two. Although there is an element of habit for some people, in which particular newspaper they buy on a day to day basis, the very fact that there large numbers to choose from is a highly positive feature of the UK. Discounting the numerous magazines which cater exclusively for the TV Celebrity and Soap fans and which cannot be truthfully regarded as being either informative or educational, it is still possible for a person to make a deliberate choice of their reading matter.

The good old “tits and bums” red-top tabloid newspaper, typically represented by the likes of the Sun and the Star are exactly what they purport to be. Regarded by many, as little more than adult comics, they tend to cater for those who are drawn to sensational headlines and who require the minimum amount of real information which is probably symptomatic of the world we live in today. This is not to openly criticize such readers, but a limited and possibly incomplete source of information cannot provide a well founded personal opinion and is far more likely to lead to a lack of real understanding about what can often be the important issues of the day.

Although it is easy to attack Britain’s TV and Radio providers and the mediocre programs that they broadcast to the nation on a daily basis, they regularly defend themselves with the excuse that their content is customer led and that viewing or listening numbers support their decisions and choices. This is the same sort of argument which is proposed by the editors of the tabloid press, the public demand stories on the Royal Family, about Pop and Soap stars, or about the contestants who have made an appearance on one of the many TV reality shows.

What a complete load of old rubbish!. The very idea that tens of thousands of readers are contacting newspaper editors to demand more pictures on Princes William and Harry or their current girlfriends is quite frankly ridiculous. What they actually mean, is that they sell more copies of their paper if the front page carries a highly sensational headline or a compromising picture of a well known person.

If you accept that in today’s society the press and the media actually create the demand, as opposed to meeting it, then the situation is far clearer. Newspapers and television are exactly the same as any other business and using that very same argument, then McDonalds, Burger King and other fast food outlets are simply meeting a demand generated by the public themselves and has nothing at all to do with the extremely expensive and highly slick advertising campaigns which these companies use in order to sell their products.

As for the content offered by our current terrestrial broadcasters, then the numbers would seem to speak for themselves. Where at one time a highly popular TV show might attract audiences of 20 million viewers, the norm nowadays would probably be a fraction of that. Consequently, program makers and broadcasters seem to produce lots and lots of cheap and cheerful telly, all of which are based on a common format or a common theme. Wildlife, food, home improvements and property as well as antiques are all used to fill the schedules, along with the regulation Soap Opera which details the dark, depressive lives of highly unlikely and generally untenable characters, who if they existed in reality would probably be slapped around the ear on a fairly regular basis by their friends and neighbours.

It is little wonder that viewer numbers are so pathetically low, or that people have little but soap characters or plot lines to discuss with one another, given the dismal programs being offered by the TV networks. Yet, as with their counterparts in the newspaper industries the broadcasters are content to blame the viewer for these poor standards, as if they have some sort of control over program content, which clearly they do not.

Where viewers have no choice regarding the actual quality of the programs being broadcast then they have little option but to accept what is being offered to them. If all TV programs are deemed to be generally rubbish, then viewers clearly have little choice but to watch the best of the rubbish that’s available.

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