I am becoming increasingly convinced that there is some sort of evil plot going on, conceived by the ‘big-boys’ of television, designed to make us all want to give up our ‘free-to-air’ programs in favour of the paid for stuff produced by Foxtel! Even Telstra seems to be involved, they no longer produce their popular and efficient ‘T-Box’, which took ordinary TV’s up a level, so that they could record shows and various other advantages.
Can there be any other conceivable reason why Channel Seven, Channel Nine and to a certain extent even SBS, put so much absolute drivel to air, pretty well every night of the week? And they all make the situation far worse, it would appear, by trying to imitate, and outdo each other by producing more and more idiotic shows, copying each other in both the style and the content of everything they expect us to watch!
Take the host of cooking programs we now have to sit through, and by this, I don’t mean the fairly sensible and interesting cookery shows like “The Cook and the Chef”, or Nigella Lawson’s show. No, the ones I really hate are those that insert the “drama” of competition into everything they do, with the obviously scripted antagonism and the tearful departure of some unfortunate competitor each week. I guess ‘Master Chef’ was the leader in this little race, closely followed by ‘My Kitchen Rules’ and there are now several more protagonists, wasting our time.
Then there are the supposed ‘marriage’ shows, like ‘Married at First Sight’ and several other competitors, taking part in what is actually not too far removed from legal prostitution! Again, these shows are obviously fully scripted in order to ensure the inclusion of mystery, antagonism and tension into shows that would otherwise be about as exciting as watching paint dry!
In actual fact, anything further from “reality” would be hard to imagine, in all of these shows, and that’s just another thing they all have in common with each other.
In addition to the supposed ruse by the TV companies to get us to switch to the paid variety, I believe another reason for the low level of skill or talent demonstrated, is the fact that there are now too many TV channels! Twenty years or more ago, when there were just one or two TV channels, producers were able to call on a decent sized well of writing talent to invent new shows of high quality for them, whether it was mystery, documentary, music or comedy, it was always well written and interesting. Now we have forty or fifty channels, (maybe even more), but the pool of really talented writers is still much the same as it was thirty years ago, so their work has to be spread much thinner, with the large remaining gaps in schedules filled by anything cheap and usually talentless the producers can get hold of.
One of the main reasons why the switch to pay TV I’m sure the big companies are hoping for is going to be an even bigger disaster, unless they change their formats, is that their material is no better than the stuff we are getting on free-to-air! I took out a plan with Foxtel a few months ago, to see what it was like and at least ‘give-it-a-go’, but after about two months I sent it back and cancelled my contract. Their whole system seems untidy to work with, their programming is, as I said, no better than free to air and a lot of the material is replayed from the free channel anyway, so we had already seen it. (On top of all that, you still have to be swamped with advertisements, again just like free TV, but here you have the privilege of paying for it!).
No, I am going to stick to my trusty Telstra T-Box for as long as it will serve me – after that, I have no ideas, apart from the channel I watch most already – ABC!
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