TV rant, part one of at least three. A series spread over a number of nights.

I came home tonight, had a bit of a cuddle with my daughter while her Mam read her a story and was going to settle in and watch a film or maybe play this flight simulator I have but then decided against it.

The first thing I have actually done is to break out the Mr Muscle (the TV made me buy it) and clean my monitor as last night I was playing said flight simulator and discovered after about half an hour that the distant tank I had been trying to lock onto with my TV guided Maverick missiles was actually a speck of dirt but I suppose that is incidental in the grand scheme of things and not something that is going to encourage people to read this here blog.

Anyway the reason I watch films or boxsets or piss about on my computer is that I reached and breached my tolerance for watching scheduled television some years ago. I literally can't fucking stand it. The main channels, around prime time at least, have degenerated into such utter bollocks that I can't sit and watch for more than a few minutes without loudly and very vocally ripping the programs to pieces. This half baked dissection and sweary vitriol is not, as I am sure you can imagine, conducive to a happy and healthy night on the sofa for my other half and so I choose to spare her by going and doing something less boring instead.

It must just be me. Everybody else seems to get along with TV just fine don't they? Put the kids to bed, pour a glass of wine and then cuddle up watching Eastenders or The Bill, or "Strictly" (oh my how abbreviations like that make me want to commit murder. "Did you watch Strictly?" "Have you heard the new Robbie song?" "Did you see Enders?" feel free to fall on a kitchen knife from a great height all users of the above), it all seems so normal and it happens in most households up and down the country so why must it gall me so?

Let's take soap operas for a starter. Simply written, unforgivably scripted and poorly played out by up and coming actors who can't land a decent gig, shitty actors that are stagnating or established actors that have hit a rough patch on the way down. Designed, yes designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator as a sort of ongoing and dumbed down metaphor for your life that will be there in front of you at the same time and on the same channel for as long as you choose to give them ratings. The people out there that buy a magazine to keep up with plotlines or refer to the characters by name as if they know them or as if they are real need to piss off somewhere far away and have a concerned word with themselves. They could also stick two wet fingers in a plug socket as an alternative.

If you must allow Eastenders or it's ilk into your home then consider the following a damning indictment of your own guilt:

You have helped create the concept of a typecasted acting career unlike any other, the one I like to refer to as "The Adam Woodyatt". Once upon a time there was a "type" of "cast", that is to say that a person in a successful role that he or she played well may then be asked to recreate that role in a similar guise but for a different production. Archetypal hard men, the femme fatale, the comedic foil, some roles just suit some people very well but Ian Beale? The man Adam is actually typecast as the same fucking character in the same program. Forever. He is on the gravy train and he will now never get off. Alec Guinness died a bitter, bitter man because for all his stage and screen greatness, his range and acting prowess he will forever be remembered as Obi Wan Kenobi so imagine the torment you are putting this poor bastard through week in and week out.

It's just horrible, lazy, TV and it needs to be put out of it's misery. The next time someone remarks how amazing it is that these programs are filmed and broadcast within such a strict timeline please remind them of the fact they are written very quickly too and there is a very obvious reason for that which I won't patronise anyone by explaining.
Go on then I will, it's because there are monkeys and there are typewriters but none of the little cunt's have gone near to approaching Shakespeare as yet. Soap operas are the waste, the by-product of that particular experiment.

Reality TV is far worse. Take The X Factor. You are as a nation watching the hopes and dreams of very real people and then hoping upon hope that everything will go wrong for them and you can then somehow feel better about yourself. Go on, admit it. If you wanted to see some young girl that can sing fairly well get a record deal and then be forgotten about a year later you could simply just buy pop records. But you don't want that. You want five young girls or boys or five groups of young girls or boys or any mixture thereof to try really hard at something and go up against each other in order to see some of them cry and then fail. You want to pick your favourite little boy or girl and get right behind them like some crazed football hooligan, abandoning all reason and logic while a pantomime panel of fucking idiots and botox filled industry "experts" chews them up and then spits them out while taking all their money from them and then when the series ends you can forget about it all until next year.

You want to perpetuate the myth that someone appearing on television has somehow "made it", that coming up through the ranks in the traditional manner of writing and gigging, playing the pubs and clubs, being spotted by a talent scout and him/her passing your demo to an A+R can be condensed into some shitty, low rent, zero production value TV program that takes millions in phone vote revenue (even when those lines are closed) and lines the pockets of it's self absorbed, soul sucking, role playing contributors. Congratulations, you paid to kill the music industry while at the same time making it's murderers rich beyond belief.

To be continued...