Television - Shrug Of The Nation

I’d call it tripe but when cleaned up and prepared in the correct way, tripe is very appetising and fulfilling, no matter what you do with this it is still an unpalatable abomination.

The term reality TV is quite promising insofar as it suggests a footing in and a reflection of the world in which we all live. It becomes apparent pretty quickly though that we are dealing with the reality of some other species, a parallel reality perhaps.

Is there another civilisation that I don’t know about living on this planet, one we never see or encounter, who don’t share anything with us apart from one thing - they watch TV. They don’t participate in our world in any other way, but they all have cable subscriptions - this is it, this has got to be the target market.

Because nobody I know or know of, is of the opinion that watching a show in which busty blond Samantha who once went out with a fella who went to school with John Terry “wins” by virtue of being able to eat more dung beetles than a chap who once had a walk on part in Byker Grove is first rate entertainment.

It in fact provides a new basis for refusing to pay the TV licence - “but you don’t produce any programs for my species”. I’d like to see a Circuit Court judge’s reaction to that defence if you were to really dig your heels in and trust the judiciary to arrive at the only morally acceptable outcome. “I find in favour of the defendant based entirely on his wholly plausible contention that your product is aimed at other life forms”

Producing shows such as Failte Towers and Living with Lucy is considered by the powers that be in RTE to be preferable to putting money into the nurturing of real talent or worthwhile drama and documentary programmes. When I first heard the term Reality TV, I in my naiveté assumed that it was in fact a new, most likely American, way of describing a documentary. RTE don’t have funding issues they have misappropriation issues.

I’m sure I’m not alone in being able to remember a time when Channel Four was good, their flagship show now is called Celebrity Big Brother. My Sky package gives me half a dozen American evangelical channels but not BBC Three or Four, two channels whereon you would harbour some faint hope of coming across something connected to planet earth. It took a forty minute phone call one day to reconfigure my setup and squeeze them in between Living +12 and Men & Motors.

You, like myself, probably have a lot of little jobs around the house that you keep meaning to take care of but never quite do. The niggly things that started out small but have evolved into gargantuan, epic tasks and grow by the second. I’m talking about the pollyfilla for the hole in the kid’s bedroom wall, the new handle for the kitchen cabinet, hanging the timber shelves that have been propped in a corner unopened since last Easter.

Well let me share a motivational technique I discovered recently that will help you to reclaim your realm from the demons of procrastination. 1.Throw a few logs on the fire, get a cup of tea, sit down, make yourself comfortable and grab the TV remote. 2. Try to find something that a reasonable, rational, sane person would find enlightening or entertaining. 3.Nothing on the first circuit? Try again. Repeat three times.

Now turn off the TV, sit back for a moment and ponder this. Which is the more enticing - climbing into the attic to lag the water pipes or sitting through an hour of Fat Teenagers Can’t Hunt? Exactly.

Now I’m prepared to admit that this could be my fault; that somehow I’m not tuned into the zeitgeist or am even participating in the same consciousness as everybody else. I after all live a fairly sheltered existence in rural Ireland and know only trivial things, for example that milk comes from cows or that Sacramento is the capital of California.

And in all likelihood it’s knowledge like that which is putting me at a disadvantage. Could it be that I know too much to enjoy reality TV or that on the other hand I don’t know enough about the right things ? I think I’m safe in saying that everybody I know is aware that milk comes from cows also and none of them enjoy reality TV either.

All this time me and my ilk have been in pursuit of the wrong kind of knowledge, in our misguided quest for useful and worthwhile pieces of information we have firewalled ourselves from the primal glee to be derived from watching someone very few people have heard of scream racist abuse at someone even fewer people have heard of on live television.

There are I’m sure large swathes of the population that are similarly out of the loop when it comes to this issue. It is in fact a splendid idea for a reality TV show - “Skinny Culchies Don’t Know Reality TV”. Bear with me. We could be assigned a series of tasks in which we are required to re enact legendary scenes from seminal reality shows or reproduce famous lines of dialogue uttered by participants, and the public could vote off those of us who do it unsatisfactorily or unconvincingly.

There could be a three person judging panel who would provide insightful tips and constructive criticism as the weeks progressed. Bill Cullen, Grainne Seoige and Bertie Ahern. Because there’s nobody knows show business like Bertie knows show business. The good cop bad cop routine. Bill could provide the hard nosed put downs while Bertie could as always be everybody’s friend with Grainne entrusted with the casting (e) vote when the situation, or the viewing figures required it. Bertie, having spent the last decade as the lead in a never ending pantomime should have a particular aptitude for such a setting.

I’m a Homo Sapien, Get me out of Here.