Friday, 14 January 2011

Dear John

I spend a lot of time deriding the viewing habits of the general public, which is a polite way of saying a lot of my friends have poor taste. Television, I used to think, is an excellent guide to the decline of civilisation, but I consoled myself with the thought that no matter how bad it got we would never sink as low as our American cousins. Blind Date, which ran for an astonishing 18 years, disabused me of that notion; who commits the greater crime - the country that creates an appalling television format or the country that copies it?

Later I decided it had always been crap, rather like discovering how bad your favourite childhood cartoon was, though it hasn’t stopped me from mocking those who watch reality programmes or the various soaps; excepting Coronation Street because... er... that’s the one I watch. There is great television available, if you look hard enough, but what greater pleasure can there be than finding quality where it is least expected? None more so than in John Stape, Corrie’s increasingly hapless serial killer:
You buried my son under a knicker factory.
…complains his soon to be latest victim. To which he replies:
It sounds worse than it is.


  1. that just made me laugh, even though I'm not a corrie fan.


  2. From one of your "American cousins": I am pretty well boycotting all TV now, because of one-sided political ranting on our cable channels, & also because of the "appalling" (good word) reality shows which, I feel, have contributed vastly toward the further coarsening of our culture.
    A TV in bedroom with DVD player and movies + discs with episodes of "Bewitched," "Friends," and "Sex And The City."
    I refuse to come home, turn on the TV, for half an hour, & be pummeled by 26 minutes of commercials and 4 minutes of rude, crude content. (When I was a little girl, it was the opposite way around -- 26 minutes of program...) The FCC was crazy to give the Hollywood hucksters free rein: I just won't watch 'em anymore.