Kill Your Television

TV. It’s got my blood pressure up since I got back. I can hear myself harumphing like my grandad used to when anything political came on TV, and he started off with “send them all to the Hebrides, and shoot any bugger that tries to escape!”.

Whether it’s Jaguar’s gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous advert, Barry Scott and his Cillit Bang, or Marks and Spencer and their food porn this-is-not-just-salmon twaddle (no, sorry, it is just salmon even if you charge twice as much and give it a soy glaze), adverts in the UK over the last year seem to have become even more condescending, dull and predictable than I remember. The standard of them makes me feel that either all of the creative agencies in the UK have run out of ideas and are finding as many ways as they can to re-hash the same old shite, or people’s expectations are so low that they haven’t noticed what shite they’re being sold. Hang on, it’s both. At least the utterly ludicrous advertising I saw in a lot of countries when I was away knew it was shite.

That’s just the advertising. The saddest thing is that between all this drivel is more drivel – Big Brother currently serving up tired old C-list media whores with all the talent and charisma of a pencil sharpening, camp antiques experts, endless top 100 this that and the other shows, and reality TV series about idiots you wouldn’t look at twice in the street unless you fell over their prams. TV is truly going down the toilet, maybe always has been, like some Mobius strip of crapness. It’s a relief therefore that amongst all this mediocrity and televisual chaff, there are occasional jewels to be found – most of them on the BBC and Channel 4, if you discount their contributions to crapness, such as Top 100 Celebrity Nostrils. If I had to identify what was wrong with British TV in a word, it would be Celebrity. I don’t even need to describe what sheer crapness just that word implies.