Monday 14 November 2011

I'm an ordinary TV viewer... get me out of here

I can just about see it with X Factor for example, providing you put to one side the preposterous notion that it's a talent show and accept it merely as 'entertainment'. Strictly Come Dancing too, OK, I can see why people like that. But this is both depressingly inevitable and at the same time utterly incomprehensible to me. What the bloody hell do people get out of watching this bilge?

I had the misfortune, for the first time, to catch most of an episode this week. It will be the last time I do. I simply cannot see what's entertaining about watching Z-list celebs, predictably a mélange of on-the-career-down-slopers, people who were famous 30 years ago and people I've never heard of in the first place, subjecting themselves to the ignoble tasks demanded of them by this show. What is anybody, anybody getting out of watching some poor, desperate, overweight, too-many-facelifts luvvie sod dunk their face into a writhing box of cockroaches? I simply can't understand it.

And there's always one person on it who disappoints you by going on there. What the hell does Willie Carson need to demean himself on this for, given the career he had and the esteem in which he's still held by the horseracing community? He can do himself no good on there - he's betting his dignity and it's not a bet he can win on this vehicle.

I also thought that the days of using live animals to create entertainment were largely behind us, so why is it acceptable to watch them eaten alive, crushed, smacked aside, whatever, simply because they're invertebrates? Are the same people who watch this also campaigning against fox hunting? Or telling the Spaniards they can't fight bulls? Morally, what's the difference? Do the producers of TV programmes now get to decide which animals can be disposed of for sport and which cannot?

Throw in those insufferable, smug gits Ant and Dec, and you've got a show which pretty much ticks all the boxes that dictate which TV I avoid. It need only feature contestants sporting Palace shirts as some kind of unspeakable, ersatz uniform, and be sponsored by the latest off-shoot of a mobile phone company (probably some ghastly all-mushroom ready-meal outfit), and you'd have the full bloody set.

But over 11 million people can't be wrong. Can they?

1 comment:

  1. It's not ok in a circus but it's ok filmed without a live audience. Personally though, I'd rather eat a cockroach than Ant or Dec

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