Another Gutter Gurgling
MP George Galloway and journalist Christopher Hitchens went head to head the other day. Should we care? Like Al Fayed versus Neil Hamiltion, neither party appeals. Rather than two bald men fighting over a comb, we have two wankers fighting over a box of Kleenex. But it is fascinating to watch precisely the sort of arguments that I normally rail against. To hell with debate, logic and reason...this is animal fury in action, a kind of Victorian fairground sideshow of freaks that terrifies anyone with a shred of humanity. Everone's welcome to this circus...just bring out your box of personal abuse, snide speeches and big, elephant-sized fallacies that sit in the room and trumpet endlessly. For some extended analysis on this shrill puppet-show read this, while the full encounter is transcripted here.
"Each gutter you find yourself in," said Hitchens, "there's another gutter gurgling underneath." Pointless on so many levels, but the twisted poetry here is impressive.
Anyway. Let us leave that there and wallow in our own gutters. Television, anyone? Once upon a few years ago I came within a hair's breadth from becoming a Programme Researcher for the BBC in Manchester. It was the wrong side of the Pennines but it was one hell of a job. In simple terms you sat in smoke-filled rooms and thrashed out the next big thing, new programmes that would grab you by the tits and never let go.
Well...in theory. The job went to one of the others with whom I attended the group interview. It is simple to dissect why I did not get the job; perhaps it was panicking over the question "what television programme has impressed you the most recently?" Be aware that the answer to this question is not, not, not Big Brother. Trust me.
Or perhaps it was the group exercise in which we brainstormed a new Saturday evening family programme. Well, it was awful. Some kind of fucked-up Frakenstein's monster emerged from that room that day and went on a rampage in downtown Common Sense. Indeed, we spent an hour or so coming up with a medieval roadshow hosted by Brian Blessed. It was awful. We were all too conscious of the whole interview process...a roomful of people trying to be the leader without dominating proceedings. Ye gods, the amount of passive-aggressive energy in that room could have powered a city the size of New York for a month. It was awful.
This is all irrelevant, though. I may not be a programme researcher but you do not to be one to see how the commission process works. Take a corpse, strip off the skin, graft on a new skin and paint up the face with this season's colours. It is a foul and ungodly process and one in thrall to the shitty god of demographics. So we need a new way of programme design. Opposites. Take a popular show and come up with the precise opposite...and we're not talking Husband Swap here.
Take a gameshow...Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. And we reverse the son of a bitch. We have people getting money in the original show, so what we need is a show in which people give money away. Some kind of charity affair but with added cruelty. You take a rich personality and get him to hold some weird vaudeville audition in which the poor and hungry do their little dances and humiliate themselves in a variety of sub-music hall acts. The most degraded gets the cash.
But you see the problem. The concept has gone full circle; if only it wasn't the concept of every gameshow ever, we would be onto something. Then you realise the underlying futility of opposites...the ones that make sense have already been done. In Casualty a life is saved whilst a bunch of people have relationships. In CSI a life is taken whilst a bunch of people don't have relationships. In Bad Lad's Army a bunch of thugs are disciplined for saying the wrong thing, whilst in Richard and Judy a bunch of ineffectual lightweights are given free reign to say the wrong thing over and over again.
The trouble is that all this is conceptual fuckwittery. The best television has ideas, it tells good stories and does not recourse to conceits. "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" No, it wouldn't. It never is.
Good television is also expensive and not easy to watch when stuffing your face with cake and scratching your balls whilst perusing the listings for something unchallenging. There is little incentive to make, or to buy this stuff in from America, when the gutter is not on television, but gurgling out of our heads and through our front rooms past the piles of empty pizza boxes and discarded copies of the News of the World. We need to see television as we do other media...something we actively choose instead of being a default state. It may not result in an instant utopia, a golden age of intelligent storytelling, but it may do away with most of ITV in a second.
Ooh, cheap shot there. Ye gods, maybe I have more in common than George Galloway than I thought. And that really does scare me.
"Each gutter you find yourself in," said Hitchens, "there's another gutter gurgling underneath." Pointless on so many levels, but the twisted poetry here is impressive.
Anyway. Let us leave that there and wallow in our own gutters. Television, anyone? Once upon a few years ago I came within a hair's breadth from becoming a Programme Researcher for the BBC in Manchester. It was the wrong side of the Pennines but it was one hell of a job. In simple terms you sat in smoke-filled rooms and thrashed out the next big thing, new programmes that would grab you by the tits and never let go.
Well...in theory. The job went to one of the others with whom I attended the group interview. It is simple to dissect why I did not get the job; perhaps it was panicking over the question "what television programme has impressed you the most recently?" Be aware that the answer to this question is not, not, not Big Brother. Trust me.
Or perhaps it was the group exercise in which we brainstormed a new Saturday evening family programme. Well, it was awful. Some kind of fucked-up Frakenstein's monster emerged from that room that day and went on a rampage in downtown Common Sense. Indeed, we spent an hour or so coming up with a medieval roadshow hosted by Brian Blessed. It was awful. We were all too conscious of the whole interview process...a roomful of people trying to be the leader without dominating proceedings. Ye gods, the amount of passive-aggressive energy in that room could have powered a city the size of New York for a month. It was awful.
This is all irrelevant, though. I may not be a programme researcher but you do not to be one to see how the commission process works. Take a corpse, strip off the skin, graft on a new skin and paint up the face with this season's colours. It is a foul and ungodly process and one in thrall to the shitty god of demographics. So we need a new way of programme design. Opposites. Take a popular show and come up with the precise opposite...and we're not talking Husband Swap here.
Take a gameshow...Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. And we reverse the son of a bitch. We have people getting money in the original show, so what we need is a show in which people give money away. Some kind of charity affair but with added cruelty. You take a rich personality and get him to hold some weird vaudeville audition in which the poor and hungry do their little dances and humiliate themselves in a variety of sub-music hall acts. The most degraded gets the cash.
But you see the problem. The concept has gone full circle; if only it wasn't the concept of every gameshow ever, we would be onto something. Then you realise the underlying futility of opposites...the ones that make sense have already been done. In Casualty a life is saved whilst a bunch of people have relationships. In CSI a life is taken whilst a bunch of people don't have relationships. In Bad Lad's Army a bunch of thugs are disciplined for saying the wrong thing, whilst in Richard and Judy a bunch of ineffectual lightweights are given free reign to say the wrong thing over and over again.
The trouble is that all this is conceptual fuckwittery. The best television has ideas, it tells good stories and does not recourse to conceits. "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" No, it wouldn't. It never is.
Good television is also expensive and not easy to watch when stuffing your face with cake and scratching your balls whilst perusing the listings for something unchallenging. There is little incentive to make, or to buy this stuff in from America, when the gutter is not on television, but gurgling out of our heads and through our front rooms past the piles of empty pizza boxes and discarded copies of the News of the World. We need to see television as we do other media...something we actively choose instead of being a default state. It may not result in an instant utopia, a golden age of intelligent storytelling, but it may do away with most of ITV in a second.
Ooh, cheap shot there. Ye gods, maybe I have more in common than George Galloway than I thought. And that really does scare me.
posted by Jamie at 11:28 AM
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