The great British piss-off

We Brits are, in many ways, a pretty stoical lot. Matters that would, in other countries, lead to cars burning in the streets or lorry-loads of cow dung being dumped outside council offices, often elicit an online petition or a sternly worded letter to The Times here.

You don’t need to look too hard for examples of our usually measured response to things we don’t like. In the south at least, we put up with an utterly laughable ‘service’ on Southern’s rail network. Certain areas like London and Brighton voted heavily in favour of Remain, only for the rest of the country to disagree. Result of these two things? Protests, yes, but hardly human sacrifice and mass hysteria.

I wonder how long it’s going to be, though, before the masses march on the offices of Love Productions with burning torches because there are some things which are guaranteed to incite British ire, and messing with the Bake-Off is one of them.

Just look at the front covers of the press and you’ll see the country’s response to what’s clearly a national catastrophe. A frenzy of punning the like of which the tabloids reserve only for the most important matters. ‘Going, going, scone’, ‘Stick your dough’, ‘Bake Off starts to crumble,’ etc. Pretty serious stuff, then.

In that spirit, you have to wonder if Channel 4 have bought a soufflé which is going to collapse the minute it’s served. The two presenters, Mel and Sue, have already stated they’re not going to move with the programme. I suspect the two experts, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, will follow suit. What exactly have C4 paid so many millions for, if they haven’t bought the very pillars around which the show’s character is built? A format which they’ll no doubt change anyway, and into which they will have to insert adverts and possibly those irritating sponsorship devices which bookend ad breaks.

The BBC, meanwhile, shouldn't find it beyond their wit to put together some other show with this same gang of four and a competition format. A colleague suggested, as a spin-off from Masterchef, it could be called 'Masterbake', but I fear that may be too strong a pun. I think, frankly, C4 have been sold a pup. Which the previous owners have put down before they deliver it to them, knowing they can always breed another one.

The fact is that, even if all four of the main ‘characters’ came over, and the format was left entirely unchanged, it sill wouldn’t deliver the same viewing figures it commands on BBC1 - people simply don’t watch Channel 4 in the numbers in which they do the Beeb, pretty much regardless of what they’re showing. Neither the channel nor the production company may give a damn of course, if they can monetise the programme in a way which you’re unable to on the BBC, but that will serve only to drive even more people away from it and make it even less the show that they’ve supposedly bought.

I’m not afraid to confess that I watch and enjoy Bake Off. I certainly won’t bother doing so on Channel 4 because, to reflect a criticism which I’ve seen more than once on the show when something’s gone badly wrong, the baker seems to have forgotten at least two of the main ingredients. They’ve taken a tried and trusted recipe for a reliably moist, delicious sponge, and they’re going to deliver a half-baked sourdough instead. You need only have a look at Channel 4’s Twitter feed to see that the British public are not amused. The online petition which I mentioned typifies the British response to such things has already started, but I fear that when they see what's actually served up the viewing public may, in this case, behave out of character and go straight to the 'sticking the heads of those responsible on spikes and parading them around London' stage. If they didn't know beforehand what the likely reaction would be, it must already be pretty clear to them what they've done.

Welcome to reality

An outstanding and humbling piece of TV last night. I strongly recommend that you catch Welcome to India on the Beeb's iPlayer if you can, before it disappears. The first in a series of three, it was a programme that would have shown even the most stubborn of ingrates counting their blessings in western Europe.

Some startling facts emerged from this programme - that some 17% of the world's entire supply of gold is in the homes of Indian housewives, for example, a figure to exceed the combined total of the reserves of the UK, the US and the IMD. Gold, in fact, featured heavily in what followed. The wealth stored up in that total is not, does not, of course, filter all the way down the production chain.

We were introduced to the lads who smelt gold in very small quantities on the rooftops of Calcutta houses, mixing the raw materials by hand. Raw materials which included strong acids and liquid mercury. They 'cleaned' their hands by rubbing them against the nearest wall, taking the top layer of skin off in the process.

Further down the scale, though, were the lads who leave their single-room dwelling, which fifteen of them were sharing, at 3am to go to work. Walking the (briefly) quiet streets of Calcutta at this hour, past the dozing bodies of countless hundreds of people sleeping out in the road (any one of whose stories could surely just as easily have been told), they swept up the dust and shit (literally) from the road in the gold district and processed it, looking for the tiniest flakes of gold. Hunting for dust-sized flakes from people's skin or clothes, they eked a living from the street.

One entrepreneurial chap had decided the drains offered better opportunities, as so many people wash in the road that there must be gold down there. Standing in a culvert that was basically the size of an upright coffin, shovelling black mud, rubbish and sewage into bags to sell on to larger-scale operators, they formed part of an economy in which two-thirds of the country's GDP is 'off the books'. With his meagre income he and his friends had, through their willingness to stand neck-deep in filth every day, earned enough to rent a room of his own. One room, about the size of a British box room, in which he and five or six others would be able to live happily and escape the prison of fifteen-to-a-room rented accommodation he was used to. I could not even begin to adequately describe the toilet facilities. Our entrepreneur, though, was a very happy man with the new arrangements.

There were other stories. People living in shacks of bamboo sticks and plastic sheeting, trying to grow fenugreek on the beach or run an illicit bar, dodging council demolition trucks intent on destroying their homes. Lads selling pirated books to people in cars, dodging traffic on the busiest main roads in the city and sleeping in the park. None of these people complaining about their lot, all of them quick to smile, all looking out for each other.

I will make a point of watching the other two programmes in this short series. My girlfriend and I were looking at each other during this first episode, marvelling at how extraordinarily wealthy, how incredibly fortunate we are. But for an accident of birth any one of us could just as easily be living the same life, or worse, as those featured. I urge you to catch this if you can - as well as a lesson in our own good fortune, it will also serve as a reminder that for all the mindless, vacuous, tissue-thin celeb-obsessed bollocks that's on telly these days, it's still capable of pedagogical and emotional power.

Hopefully Big Brother will be considerably smaller this time round

With depressing inevitability, and exactly as predicted on this very blog, Big Brother makes its reappearance tonight, this time within the tawdry confines of the Channel 5 schedule, with a 'celebrity' version launching this evening.

God help us. With a recent bout of societal self-examination following the rioting, I would have hoped that this is the very last sort of thing that people would get behind. My first ever entry on this blog, back in June 2010, bemoaned the cultural bankruptcy and vacuity of this vehicle, but predicted it would be picked up by one of the other channels when C4 were done with it. Channel 5's output is not exactly overflowing with high quality original content as it is, and this will do nothing to raise the bar generally. It seems they're quite happy to recycle Channel 4's rubbish for them.

I sincerely hope that, particularly in the light of the recent trouble, this will bomb completely and disappear from view once and for all. If it does, I know, of course, it will not be as a direct result of what's gone on in our cities lately. But I do believe that such trite celebrity bollocks is one very small reason among the myriad causes that sparked the trouble. Not Big Brother specifically, you understand, but the celebration and elevation of celebrity regardless of the talent or achievements of the people enjoying it, which in turn leads to a sense of entitlement to wealth and fame without any discernible reason for gaining it. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a negative reaction BB in the post-riot television landscape, and it will suffer from its own emptiness.

I'm not holding my breath, though - the fascination some people have for these Z-listers seems endless, and there is talk that Charlie Sheen will be one of the 'guests', which will doubtless draw in those who regard car-crash television and live personal breakdowns as entertainment, just in case he goes nuts. Frankly, I don't care if he starts sawing his housemates' heads off with a butter knife, though I suspect the producers would be secretly delighted if he did. I won't be breaking what's now a years-long habit and watching so much as a minute of it.

Latest piece for Wonderlance

Forgive, again, the self-indulgence, but my latest bit for Wonderlance has just come out, here:

http://www.wonderlance.com/february2011_tvww_wondersuniverse.html

For anybody unfortunate enough to miss it, Wonders of the Solar System was the best thing on TV last year by a country mile, and its follow-up is coming out soon. I urge everybody to watch it, it's a truly eye-opening and humbling experience to realise how genuinely insignificant we are.

Bonfire of originality

The success of the reintroduction of Doctor Who to our screens in the last few years seems to be in the vanguard of a rash of other programmes being dusted off, re-worked and introduced to a new audience. Or re-introduced to people already very familiar with them.

Just yesterday I saw that Upstairs Downstairs is to return to our screens after an absence of 35 years. A mini-series will evidently pick up some time after the 70s incarnation left off, even containing one of the original cast members, with Jean Marsh, one of the co-originators of the series, reprising her role as Rose. Doubtless, if it proves popular, a full series could follow.

Then this morning I learn that that scourge of the middle classes, William Brown, is also to return in a new version of Just William. Anybody of my age, even if they're unaware of the original books, will certainly remember Violet Elizabeth's threat to 'scrtheam and scrtheam and scrthream until I'm thick...', coming from the perfectly cast then child actress Bonnie Langford. Given that this will be the fourth time this has been made for television, following series in the 60s, 70s and 90s, there will doubtless be those of other generations who recall their own version of William's nemesis just as clearly.

Now don't get me wrong, if they're done well, it'll be great if these new versions introduce what are viewed as classic characters and tales to a new, wider audience. But it could be said that this re-hashing of existing work is a sign of the paucity of quality of original work available or, worse, a reluctance on the part of those mysterious powers that be to make anything written by new writers or containing new ideas.

Wouldn't it be better to spend at least some of the money going into these on some new work? Just a thought. Or, perhaps, given the frequency with which William in particular seems to crop up on our screens, we're merely going through part of an entirely cyclical phase in which TV endlessly recapitulates its content, and it's always been this way.

Sky's powers need a limit

This caught my interest yesterday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11452434

You'll see, if you read the piece, a reference to this case potentially being the Bosman of broadcasting. That may not mean anything to you if you don't follow football but it could mean a complete freeing up of broadcast consumers' right to choose, with pub landlords such as Ms Murphy being able to buy their satellite football coverage from suppliers based overseas. Personally, I wish her the best. I realise that it's the Premier League who have brought the action, not Sky, but we all know who stands to benefit most. Sky's water-tight relationship with the Premier League, and their resultant dominance of football coverage in this country, is so overpowering that they're changing the face of the game, and not necessarily for the better.

I'd like to know which other business limits your right to choose so zealously - if you want a Mini, for example, you can buy one not only from any Mini dealership but plenty of other sources. The good people who make Minis are not going to come after you for failing to buy them from a single outlet, nominated by them, who charges you ten times the price of the bloke down the road.

Ms Murphy is not even stealing intellectual property in my opinion, because she's been paying an authorised supplier of the images, merely one that's authorised in another territory. She describes Sky as 'greedy' and argues that they run a zealously guarded virtual monopoly, free to charge pubs for example, almost what they want for their coverage in this country.

I realise it's not as simple as that - I know that Sky supply a lot of the infrastructure and bandwidth on which many other satellite channels rely, for example - but anything which prises open Sky and the Premier League's vice-like grip on football can only be a good thing for me.

What's the opposite of a virtuous circle?

How does already micron-thin televisual credibility shave yet another nanometre off its already translucent girth? Somehow they (whoever the mysterious 'they' may be) keep suggesting, and another 'they' keep approving, increasingly mind-numbing ways to do so. There's an episode of Come Dine With Me, a show which is already solely redeemed by a catty, knowing voice-over, due to air shortly in which all the contestants are former Big Brother 'winners'. This is TV turning in ever-decreasing circles, clamping its sucker-mouth onto its own belly, one already distended through lack of nourishment. How much more self-referential, how much more pointless, how much more banal is it going to get before it disappears up its own anus and, please, please, some quality TV appears to fill the resultant void?

Everybody who's tried to create a perpetual motion machine has failed - the law of diminishing returns always wins. TV is trying to feed off its own excrement and part of me hopes it gorges itself - with any luck it'll leave the landscape clearer for something interesting to follow on behind. Regrettably, this will doubtless result before that happens in "Come Dine With Celebrity Cash in the Big Brother Attic", or "X-Factor Flogs Talent", or some other monstrous hybrid.

One of these shows' 'concepts' has given me an idea, though. I believe there's one where people set their house up as an instant restaurant, produce food for visitors, and the visitors pay whatever they think the meal's worth. Would that we could do the same with the licence fee. "I've seen your offering for the past year, and frankly, it was shit. Bland, texturally disastrous, soggy, unimaginative, derivative and it left me feeling queasy. You get twenty quid, and nineteen of that was for the new Attenborough documentaries." That'd learn 'em. Unfortunately it would only give them the budget to make even more such tripe.

Thank whatever it is you swear by for books, DVDs and Radio 5Live Sport.

My first and last post on the X-Factor

I don't want to be part of the process which feeds these abominable programmes so will not make more than this one comment on the X-Factor 'scandal'. The emerging 'news' that digital chicanery is apparently involved to tweak the sounds emitted from the tortured souls who take part in it is the least surprising of this week's headlines.

I don't watch the show, so was sitting in the next room during its broadcast while everybody else in the house watched it last weekend. I could hear the caterwailing screeches of some of the contestants who are clearly put on stage for people who get some kind of enjoyment out of large scale personal humiliation, one in particular sounded like a desperate fox being stabbed while attempting to copulate with a confused and unwilling cat.

But the idea that what viewers are hearing on telly is not even representative of the actual efforts of the poor bastards, that the producers do not even allow an unadulterated version of events to be broadcast, surely renders utterly meaningless any pretence of a point that the show had as a talent competition? Or am I being naive to think that this was in any way the point of this type of endeavour these days? The idea of a TV talent show is, of course, a very old one, going back through New Faces, Hughie Green and possibly even before him for all I know, but at least then the heart of the show was worn on its sleeve.

It was then an opportunity to showcase undiscovered talent. The people who made it to the screen had, I assume, gone through some kind of filter already whereby those who sounded like they had no place on stage did not get that place, thereby preventing the kind of infamy which some people bizarrely seem to actively seek these days. They might as well, with many of the modern incarnations of this type of thing, openly admit that they're only there for the money that can be made from phone calls, record sales, media tie-ins and God knows what else.

I much prefer that sort of bare-faced (dis)honesty to the charade they're currently undertaking, where they seem unwilling to admit that they have the ability to fix the show completely in favour of those they think will sell best, look best, make the best puppet. What a tawdry affair it all is - entirely in keeping with the whole platform, if you ask me.