Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Sorrows of the Sofa

We will the biggest nation in Europe by 2060 and it will be interesting to see whether our anybody in our crowded island will, by that time, have discovered the secret of breakfast television. I have previously remarked on the amazing beneficence of the BBC in making a morning show for just one viewer, me. I watch out of pity, wondering why on earth they can't just drop the lame attempts at tabloid junk and do a TV version of Radio 4's Today programme. This morning pity failed and, while on the old exercise bike, I turned over to GMTV. Dear God! This has a funeral parlour set and is presented by an estate agent and some chick who hasn't learned the first lesson of Fox News - the hair, sweetheart, should not move at all. It was so boring and inane that even poor Penny Smith, now reduced to reading the news, felt obliged to call the sofa duo Ken and Barbie, a cut so cruel that I'm amazed they stayed on air. Perhaps they didn't; cringing with shock and embarrassment, I had to turn back to the quiet ineptitude of my own private show.

10 comments:

  1. It is surely only a matter of time before your thinness and Madeley-like reverse chronology ensures you your own TV programme.

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  2. For a moment I thought you were on about your diet again - in 2060 there'll be millions and millions of gargantuan Brits stuck to their sofas crying into their tubs of Haagen-Dazs and wishing they had taken a leaf out of Appleyard's book (the philosophy/diet book, that is: Ecce Homo - Why am I so Thin?).

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  3. Your own TV-programme? Absolutely!

    Something like a remake of the 1934 comedy-mystery The Thin Man, with William Powell, Myrna Loy and Maureen O'Sullivan, now featuring Bryan Appleyard, a tall, thin, former professional hack who looks like the popular idea of a dietary experiment and whose main asset is his elusive and not entirely unsympathetic personality...

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  4. The show, however, would only be a stepping stone to your eventual role as a relatively benign fascist dictator.

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  5. Thankfully I'll not be around in 52 years to see the crowds, but I would be surprised if the 'secret of breakfast television' has been unearthed by then because I don't believe there is an audience (big enough) for it in Albion - not at breakfast, or lunch, or any other time. That GMTV show is the default setting for acres of pap that follows it during the day, from Loose Women to Richard and Judy, and we have to assume that several clever Tristrams have done the research, and decided that they can't battle the ratings;the fatties, the unemployed and unemployable, the knife-wielding hoodies et al, only want pap, reality and celebrity, and that is what they get.
    Watching HBO's Bill Maher the other night, taking a feed from a couple of US Senators, and with a panel in the studio of Sean Penn (try and find a British actor/director as politically savvy as Penn - don't bother, he doesn't exist), Gary Shandling and rising Democrat Harold Ford Jr, and balancing a lightness of touch with, overall, a serious undertow, I mused that such well informed people, completely comfortable under the lens, simply don't exist here or, if they do, no TV producer has the balls to build a programme around them. Paxo, Humphrys? Er no, I don't think so. Sian or Bill? Please...

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  6. I'm surprised you don't just listen to the radio, or your iPod while you exercise. But I guess you're a news junkie, being in the biz and all. Moi, I seem to start my day with this laptop and coffee. Our poor newspaper is getting as thin as you these days and will doubtless soon disappear altogether.

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  7. I'm surprised you don't get a real bike and get out. perhaps you're not slim enough for public displays of exercise.

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  8. But shouldn't it be an obvious point that we are not all intellectuals? Most people I suspect would not particularly appreciate a TV version of Radio 4. If they would, why don't more radio listeners listen to Radio 4 than they do?

    That said, I agree there should be a TV version of Radio 4 for cerebral types. And who knows how many borderline thinkers might be gravitated upstairs by the offered alternative.

    That there isn't such an alternative raises the usual questions about what the BBC is for. Surely it can't be about money. How expensive must it be to have a bunch of intellectuals lounging around on sofas drinking coffee, talking about the Universe?

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  9. They tried that thing with intellectuals on sofas back in the 90s... it was called the 'Brains Trust' or some such rubbish. A revival of a much beloved radio/TV programme from the 40s and 50s apparently. Dire, dire, dire...

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  10. No doubt you have a point Vernon. Intellectual Breakfast TV is definitely the sort of thing you can imagine might all too easily go wrong. Still, if at first you don't succeed..and etc. The application may be flawed. Does that flaw the idea?

    Perhaps less lounging, perhaps they can sit a bit more uprightly. There'd need to be structure and focus. It should be related to topical, newsy issues for sure but could enjoy a wondrous freedom to tangentialise into abstraction and grand narratives if appropriate. No damn man behind the lense squeezing your words into a time jacket!

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