The public intellectual and afternoon TV
On a wet day this week I was dying. Well, OK, I had a cold. Despite the illness I decided I needed to fill the day with something useful.
I withdrew to a room with my box of tissues and a cup of tea, closed the curtains so no-one could see and settled down to watch Freeview afternoon TV.
My expectations were low. I assumed our masters of programming reserved their worst crap for their afternoon viewers. After all, they are a voiceless mass of stay-at-homes who take what they are given.
I started on Monday at 12.25pm and wrapped up the proceedings at 4.15pm, having watched nearly four hours of continuous television.
In many ways, the programmes were terrific. I started on TVNZ1 with Emmerdale Farm and lines like, ‘‘You’re worth a hundred Bell Dingles’’ and, ‘‘Right now, crazy is all I’ve got’’. It had plenty of features that I imagine are meant martin.vanbeynen@stuff.co.nz to connect with the target audience. Things like babies, dog crap and the unemployed.
After Emmerdale it was quickly on to the ‘‘tiny house awesomeness’’ of Tiny House Nation, which was fun but you wonder if these people have ever seen a decent caravan.
At 1.15pm I switched to TVNZ2, where Judge Rinder was playing. This is a British programme where Rinder, a camp jurist, adjudicates disputes between ordinary folks. In a tale stranger than fiction, a large woman of about 60 claimed her wedding was ruined when the remedial tattoo she had done on her foot caused a serious infection. She blamed the tattooist, who counter-claimed, saying she had destroyed his business by posting malicious falsehoods on Facebook.
Rinder’s decision was a master class in clear, sharp, legal thinking.
Then over to 3 for the end of a replay of Sunday night’s Dancing with the Stars, a great show which should not be mistaken for an ad for make-up, spray tans and hair gel. No worries about political correctness here. Marama Fox innocuously called her partner a ‘‘skinny white boy’’, a remark that would predictably upset a moronic few.
By 2.20pm I was on Bravo watching Top Chef Jnr and pineapple-glazed salmon, thinking kids shouldn’t be doing this stuff and adult chefs shouldn’t be talking about burnt taro chips.
Dress to Impress followed Top Chef Jnr. This was a programme where three young men, seemingly encouraged to be as obnoxious as possible, have to buy clothes for a young woman. Raheem, an ironpumping meathead, said: ‘‘The first fing I noticed, she’s got a nice, lovely set of teeth.’’
At 2.40pm Maori TV was like an oasis of calm with Nga Pari Karangaranga O Te Motu, which featured an elderly woman talking quietly about her parents and late husband.
‘‘It was a sad time when our mother died . . . When the pain got too bad she would lash out at my father and he just continued praying.’’
Next up was Takaro Tribe ,an animated children’s programme where the cartoon cherubs represent the vowels and are coloured different tones of brown to be as inclusive as possible. The word for the day was keke (cake).
A quick switch to Prime then, to catch the quiz shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Good hosts, intelligent questions and smart guests. Then the Choice channel for Love Nature, to watch 20 minutes of crocodiles tearing flesh from a water buffalo that had expired in their mud-thick waterhole. Human beings have come a long way.
So what’s to complain about? In a word, advertising.
By 4.15 I’d watched about 160 minutes of actual programming and another 80 minutes of advertising, much of it repetitive. It works out to about four minutes of advertising for every eight minutes of programming. By any reckoning, this is ridiculous.
After an afternoon of this, my brain had been marinated, cooked, sliced and was ready for serving to the cat.
What I can’t figure out is what’s in it for the advertisers. They must realise that level of advertising is unwelcome and obtrusive to the point of provoking an antipathy to their products. Maybe they don’t realise what programmers are doing or maybe they have such contempt for their customers they don’t care. Maybe the audience have trained their brains to switch off automatically after the regulation seven to eight minutes before advertising intrudes.
The odious combination of programme and advertising did have one useful function. It showed how the insanity of television reflects the madness of life.
One of the most moving moments of the afternoon’s viewing was a Save the Children ad (they call it a ‘‘report’’) which showed a child literally dying of malnutrition. I saw it three times.
I also watched the Huggies ad, ‘‘no baby unhugged’’, a fat boy winning Top Chef Jnr, a pumpedup body builder trying to dress a young woman and a quiz show on which one of the question sections is called ‘‘What’s for Breakfast’’.
Nobody needs that sort of madness.