REALITY TV IS AS BARBARIC AS ANYTHING IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
IN MEDIEVAL times – let’s face it, a cruel period of institutionalised torture – there were the stocks and the pillory. In the latter the victim, often the village idiot, was imprisoned in a frame of timber holding the head and hands facing the public. Passers-by could then throw garbage or rotten fruit at the defenceless face, often to the amusement of those watching.We still have the pillory today – but we call it the TV “reality show”.
Nothing could be a greater misnomer. There is nothing remotely real about this televisual tripe. It is utterly confected from the first grinning face of the show’s host to the final hysterical sign-off. Between these the participants, who clamour to be on the show and thus “on telly” – the highest form of human achievement (they think) – are urged to make complete idiots of themselves, and eagerly do so.
The only good news is that most of them are so thick they cannot work out that they are being humiliated at all.
They think they are becoming famous – the other pinnacle of achievement. Those who live entirely in that world – the world of the Big Brother House, Towie and Love Island – sometimes come to realise just what rubbish their lives have become.
Vicious “trolls” scream foul abuse online – another suppurating sore on the face of modern society. Only the fragile world of the phoney protects them and if that is removed depression and despair may well ensue, as it did for Caroline Flack and others who, in a well of misery, have ended their own lives.
We British used to value human dignity and up to a point we still do, as evidenced by the stoicism of those with homes ruined by flooding. But if a soaked sitting room needs a clean-up then so does so-called reality TV. Or we could just watch and copy a certain Queen, her son Charles, her grandchildWilliam and his wife Kate.
They are a credit to us, but the jabbering idiots on the gogglebox – nah.
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PLANS are well afoot for rock-hard pavements to be layered one day with a shock-absorber fashioned from a new compound of asphalt and rubber – the latter to derive from old car tyres. The idea is to prevent so many broken bones, especially hips, when the elderly slip, skid and crash down on granite paving stones. The technology has originated in Italy, road-tested (literally) in Sweden. So far, the falling injuries have… er… fallen. A good idea though the prospect of all those bouncing codgers is pretty intimidating. And why can our boffins not come up with a rubberoid substance to fill in our billions of potholes? The present in-fills just disintegrate within a few weeks of the job being done and the potholes are back to breaking suspension systems before winter.