Category: Television

Friday, October 19, 2001

While on a recent journey across Europe, I had the opportunity to watch even more bad television than I normally do – this time, in a range of languages I hardly understand.

Some of it was the same rubbish we get here, just given the exotic patina of being dubbed into Swiss German or the like. Anyone for ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’ in French, or ‘Walker Texas Ranger’ in German, or my own favourite, ‘Robot Wars’ in Italian. Not a franchised Italian version of the show, mind, just the English programme with frantic Italian commentary: ‘Adesso, Iron Awe da Wolverhampton!’

It was the locally produced output that I was more interested in, and as I sat in my succession of hotel rooms, I was drawn to the sports coverage. I have little French, less Italian, and no German, but I even I could tell that Italian football shows could teach ITV and TV3 a lot about stylish presentation. And I don’t just mean the scantily clad lithe beauties that cavort across the screen as a staple part of seemingly every program in Italy.

The real highlight of the endless football coverage was the use of 3-D computer modelling of fouls and goalmouth incidents. Rather than just show the suspected dive from as many camera angles as they could (which would probably be more than enough for most people), the incident is then mapped in 3-D, and rendered in a full-screen version that can be zoomed, frozen and spun ad infinitem. For the final kicker, the presenter can be placed into the middle of this environment, to lean against a virtual goalpost, or stand next to a computer-generated player that’s as tall as he is.

Of course, this flashy stuff assumes you have rights to broadcast football in the first place. But not having the rights to Champions League matches doesn’t stop RAI offering a three hour footiefest on evenings when there are games. they improvise with the mad solution of having a panel of experts all watching different games on monitors that the audience can’t see. When something happens in one of the games, the expert pipes up, and describes the event. With the host leaping between the two storeys of experts, it looks like nothing so much as a bizarre version of ‘Blankety Blank’. 

Maybe the BBC should consider this, as they have precious little sport left to show. If they can’t run to a panel of experts, they could follow the lead of one of the low-rent cable channels I saw: just have one man at a desk, watching one game, and giving live commentary of what he’s watching. It’s televised radio commentary – aside from a clock and a display of the latest score, it’s 90 minutes of watching the top of a bloke’s head while he watches the TV.

More generally Italian TV looks like it’s still 1975, complete with the Roman equivalent of ‘Seaside Special’, Pan’s People and ‘Live From Her Majesty’s’. The whole country is still entranced by the debatable delights of the variety show – you can’t move for big performance numbers, sequined top hats and three costume changes for the unctuous host. When there’s no football, this is prime-time TV. I’m glad to be back to a diet of ‘Eastenders’ and ‘Corrie’.

Monday, August 27, 2001

TV drama shows have to move comfortably in two different scales. Firstly, the small circles of the hour, with the plot coming to a reasonably conclusive end after each episode, giving the audience a satisfactory feeling of closure. Secondly, they also have to play the long game, with events building up episode by episode so the major characters develop over time.

This is why medical dramas work so well. You can bring in new characters as patients every week to power the plot for that particular episode. At the same time, the fortunes of the staff fill out the longer-term plot needs. Interlacing the two makes the whole experience much more rewarding.

Cop shows follow a similar logic, with crimes being solved in the space of one episode, but other events in the main characters’ lives stretching over whole seasons.

As we commit to watching every week, we get to feel like we’re growing with the show in the same time frame – what happened several weeks ago to Dr Green happened several weeks ago in our memory.

All this assumes a narrative order – watching one show after another in succession. So what happens when this order breaks down?

In Ireland this occurs when different stations show the same programmes. In any week you can watch the X-Files or The West Wing three times, with Sky One being quickest out of the blocks, then RTE and then one of the British terrestrial channels.

In practical terms, this is great if you happen to miss an episode, but the question is whether you start watching on one channel and stick to it, so as not to interrupt the flow, or whether you get your promiscuous kicks anywhere you can. 

The problem with this is that one channel might be leading up to a big climax, while another is way past it and into the (less suspenseful) aftermath.

In America the problem is exacerbated by the fact that popular shows are on daily, or even more frequently. Don’t ask how I know, but in New York you can watch Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman once in the afternoon, and then again at 2.30 in the morning (and some days in the early evening as well, I think).

So without trying too hard you can see Dr Mike single, happily pregnant and living with Sully, and then unhappily separated from him – all in the same day.

On the one hand, this mightn’t matter too much, as each episode has its own internal flow, and looked at one way, it’s a suitably postmodern way to watch tv. Questing for a narrative order and logical progression is considered so 19th century in critical circles.

To misquote Truffaut, watched in this way a tv series has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Personally, I have a compromise option: I try and watch new episodes in order, and use the range of stations to make sure I don’t miss one. This means I have some linear sense of the big picture, and don’t get any nasty surprises.

Once I have that shape sorted out, I’ll watch as many reruns as I can stumble across (unless it’s an episode I really didn’t like the first time round). This way, watching the old ones is like looking through a photo album, remembering how things used to be and contrasting that with the sense of the ‘present’ I get from the new ones. ‘My, how Scully’s clothes have improved since the early episodes.’

We all like to think that our lives make some narrative sense, that there is some reason to things, some sense of cause and effect. Watching shows in order plays to that view of the world. Arguably, of course, people’s lives don’t make any sense seen in any way, they just happen – like drama episodes watched out of order.

Monday, July 23, 2001

Why do I like watching people falling over on television? Probably for the same reason I like to see clips of 1970s soup commercials featuring minor celebrities when they were ten years old.

Bad TV can be really good, and I stand by my commitment to ‘You’ve Been Framed’ and ‘Before They Were Famous’ despite all criticism about the intellectual bankruptcy and all-round crapness.

First, with ‘You’ve Been Framed’ – what’s not to like? A stupid adult gets on a rope swing across a river, and even though you know exactly what’s going to happen next, it’s still great to behold when the branch snaps and the bloke gets dumped into the mud.

Or two goats arrange a cunning trap where one crouches down behind a kid and the second gives her a nudge from the front, sending the hapless four year-old falling backwards over the goat obstacle. Priceless.

Slapstick comedy is considered to be very low-brow (unless it’s Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, when you’re allowed to say it’s genius), but I’d argue that while it might not be very subtle, these pratfalls are just flat-out funny.

Normally people stay upright, stay in their rowing boats, ride their bikes OK and open patio doors before they walk through them. But on the other hand, the universe tends towards chaos, so if you have enough people standing beside a swimming pool (especially with a video camera to hand), then sooner or later someone will fall in.

And when they do, it’s funny. So long as nobody gets hurt then this stuff is a gentle reminder of our hubris in thinking that we’re in control around here. Being dumped in the mud is a forceful suggestion that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously.

A similar reminder is watching Jeremy Irons dancing around like a fool with Brian Cant on ‘Playaway’.’Before They Were Famous’ is the celebrity version of your mum showing your baby photos to your new girlfriend. You have to sit there squirming while she sees your toddler self naked on the sheepskin rug (or maybe I’m sharing too much here).

One baby looks pretty much like another, and it doesn’t really tell you anything about the person now, but it’s entertaining for her to see you in a former life, and reflect on how far you’ve come.

And it’s exactly the same when we see Martin Clunes in some 1980s horrorshow outfit trying to act tough in ‘Doctor Who’, or Grant Mitchell from ‘Eastenders’ singing ‘They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty – they’re very tasty,’ in a Kellogs ad.

Seeing these clips (and ones of a shiny young Tony Blair trying to smile when he’s just lost his deposit in his first run for parliament) reminds us not to lionize these folks, and maybe tells us something about the fleeting nature of fame. And it makes you laugh.

So don’t feel guilty if you find yourself watching ‘You’ve Been Framed’. Even when someone ends up with a portaloo tipped over them, it’s all good clean fun – you’re just becoming a connoisseur of crap.

Tuesday, June 26, 2001

I recently spent a week away from television, which might not seem the ideal preparation for writing a column of this nature, but it gave me time to consider how worthwhile it is to become embroiled in the latest soap storylines, or to be able to argue the toss over the another reality show. To ponder, in fact, whether TV is worth it. 

First I must distinguish between watching TV programmes, and ‘watching TV’. There are two televisions in the house I was staying in, but my host chooses not to watch them, except for the honourable exceptions of ‘Frasier’ and ‘Father Ted’. So she watches some programmes, she just doesn’t watch TV in that way most of us do – the ‘I’ll just sit down for half and hour while I have a cup of tea’ approach.

This means she keeps out of the way of stumbling across random shows – only with the start of the second series of ‘Big Brother’ did she know anything about the programme (and this from a woman who has a PhD in media and communications).

So what’s her beef? Essentially (and I hope I represent her fairly here, ‘cos if I don’t she’ll whack me, being my big sister and all), she believes that watching television is actively bad for you, and we’d be better off not doing it. It isolates you, and distances you from your own life, and those of the people around you as you invest yourself more fully in the superficial antics of celebrities and soap dramas.

Your experience of the world comes mediated through television, and by extension through the decisions of television stations that are much more concerned with ratings, advertising revenue and market share than grace, wisdom and compassion. As passive receivers of pre-packaged entertainment you lose the ability to decide what you would yourself like to do, simply choosing the opt out of ‘Oh, I’ll watch the TV instead.’

Even when there’s nothing on, you’ll choose the least worst option.  The irony of ‘Why Don’t You?’, that 1980s summer holidays show was that kids would much rather watch shite like ‘Why Don’t You?’ than actually go out and do anything at all.

The argument continues that the combination of the programmes and adverts present you with a shallow but seductive picture of the world which rarely tells you anything about yourself and your own life. Rather than concluding that the TV world is wrong, it’s somehow easier to conclude that it’s yoru own life that’s wrong. So at the same time as it makes your unhappy with your own real life, it sucks away the time should be spending improving your own life, making you doubly unhappy. You’re miserable, but you can’t do anything about it

A quick analysis of what people are shown doing on television is enough to prove this. From ‘Questions and Answers’ to ‘Corrie’, from ‘Grandstand’ to ‘The Sopranos’, you never see anyone watching television, or even talking about it. This should be enough to tell you two things – firstly that TV doesn’t represent the world in which you live (because there’s a shedload of TV watching going on in your life), and secondly that nothing at all dramatic, exciting or life-altering will ever happen to you while you’re watching TV (with the possible exception of a drive-by shooting).

I’m indebted to my housemate for reminding me of a further proof of this. Put a mirror on top of the television. When something really dramatic is happening to the folks on TV, look closely at them – witness their passion and emotion. Then look at yourself in the mirror. Who’s really living, then?

So as I write, this all sounds pretty plausible. How many hours have I wasted watching mediocre television? All to have gained a brain stuffed with ‘Dempsey and Makepeace’ and ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’. In idle moments I find myself wondering where Selena Scott is now, and concluding that I was too young to be that devoted to ‘thirtysomething’. 

Right now, I’m off to do something much less boring instead, but I fear it may be too late.
(Next week, I’ll put the case for the defence of TV, and of course in the interim let me know how wrong I am.)