The delights of modern television

What a load of rubbish we get forced down our throats by the television companies these days!

Especially bad are the so-called ‘reality shows’, though anything further from reality would be hard to imagine. They are obviously highly scripted, in order to make totally mundane activities seem more interesting and exciting. Plus, for some reason, the producers of these shows seem to think that friction and antagonism are a true reflection of what ‘reality’ is all about. ‘Celebrity Apprentice’, ‘My Kitchen Rules’, and ‘The Biggest Loser’ are prime cases in point, with everyone seemingly needing to be at loggerheads with other competitors, and without any real, positive result in the end.

Even ‘Master Chef’, one of the least bad of these shows manages to bring several contestants to tears at some stage during the dreary weeks the show is aired! Then we have ‘The Block’ and several other house repair programs, supposedly doing great work on dilapidated properties, but again ‘agro’ has to be built into the script, otherwise we’d all be sitting watching such epic activities as nails being hammered into wooden structures and paint rollers turning a grey wall to another grey – wow! To compound the miserable state of affairs, even when these people complete their tasks, the end result manages to look cheap and shoddy in most cases, not the sort of place most of us would wish to take ownership of.

The trouble is, where we once had one, or perhaps two channels of television, we now have thirty or forty to choose from, which naturally requires a much greater team of writers to fill the space available on each channel. The problem here is that there are only so many really good writers, and they’re all kept very busy producing the quality, entertaining programs at the other end of the TV rainbow; shows like ‘Packed to the Rafters’,  ‘Lewis’, ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and the wonderful documentaries made by David Attenborough. Unfortunately, these programs only fill about eight percent of the total TV time available and producers must be desperate to find material to fill the rest.

They have two major options here, one is to produce the awful junk discussed above, while the other is to cover sports events. And we Australian sport lovers eagerly ingest all the sport the programs the TV companies can produce. It really doesn’t matter what sport is covered; footy, netball, tennis, snooker, motor racing, moto-cross, wrestling , ice skating – I could go on, right to the end of this article, just listing all the sport that is covered by the TV bosses, but if I did I would be accused of being just as boring as the programs I am criticizing! The fact is, both these types of program also have the great advantage that they are comparatively cheap to produce, needing no complicated sets or special lighting.

There is a third option of course and it is one that is becoming used more and more to fill the holes in programming. That is the movie! Here producers have an almost unfillable pot of entertainment to dip from, with films as old as fifty or sixty years still available for broadcast and new films coming on to the market almost as fast as they can be used. And add to that the fact that these films can be repeated many times on air, as can programs made for television and suddenly there are no holes in the schedule!

This is fine, in that we are provided with a continuous stream of entertainment, but it is sad that the stream is so full of rubbish, rubbish liberally dotted with the other form of trash bobbing about on our television screens – advertisements!

But that’s another story.

Tell me which TV shows frustrate you the most on current TV…  ?

image: Ambrozjo