Dredging the bottom
Herself and I watch a good bit of television.
I suppose we have around a thousand channels, and if I switched the receiver over to the Freesat one we could pick up another couple of hundred channels that aren’t on Astra. We are spoiled for choice, except that we aren’t really as the choice of content is 99.9% pure unadulterated shite.
I remember back in my cable days when the standard choice was about six channels. The company borrowed a portable satellite dish [a massive yoke that had to be towed around on its trailer] and the Technical Manager and I had a fine time messing with it. I remember saying that it was amazing the choice that was going to be available, and he replied with an amazingly accurate forecast – he said he reckoned that channels would just dumb down to the lowest common denominator and it would be the end of decent programmes. How right he was.
Scrolling down the channels I see “documentaries” about early teenage pregnancies that imply we’re going to see the kids screwing. There is one programme where women are asked to choose a dating partner when they just see the men’s pricks on screen. Equally men have to choose women on the basis of their tits. I nearly saw a “documentary” the other night about “dogging” and I actually watched a tiny bit of it but the televised view of an arse screwing some woman in the back of a car didn’t really appeal.
The result of this is that we have to make our own viewing by “borrowing” [*cough*] material from the Interwebs. Luckily there are tens of thousand of films and series out there and that makes up the bulk of our viewing. Last night, for example we tried out a new series that was being broadcast. We had seen it before but a) we had of course forgotten the story and b) it was filmed here in the village [yes, we are too fucking popular]. The problem with the programme was the ads. They were long breaks showing unbelievably bad screechy infantile advertisements and I spent my time hitting the mute button. So I nipped out my laptop, and in fifteen minutes we were not only seeing an ad-free programme, but I had the entire series so we didn’t have to wait a week for the next episode by which time we would have forgotten the plot
Yesterday I came across a news item. Apparently there had been 25,000 complaints about “Love Island”. Now this is another programme that plumbs the murky depths and I had never watched it. It basically consisted of a bunch of incredibly dumb males and females [we used to call ’em ‘pox bottles’] chasing sex and “celebrity” status. The contestants all seem to hang around in the skimpiest of swimwear and this is supposed to entertain us. I did watch five or so minutes just to see what the fuss was about and switched channels again as the programme is tediously boring. But apparently 25,000 people were incensed enough about a cheap tacky programme to complain about its content. why the fuck can’t they just switch channels? Why can’t they switch off the box and read a book?
Thank God for the Interwebs!
We do the same. We have a PC hooked up to the big telly and watch all our stuff on that. I think we’ve seen all the films now.
That crap on the telly with the lip plumped thickos always tends to spawn some other tat. ‘Celebs do the gardening’, ‘Celebs have a poo’, ‘Celebs trip on a broken paving stone and sue the council’.
‘Celebs’ is just a code word for thick as mince, non-entities who’ve been on some reality TV show and made a tit of themselves
One of the few staged programmes I watch is The Apprentice. What staggers me is the total lack of education in the contestants. I remember one girl who didn’t even know where Dover was [Is it on the coast somewhere?!!]
I remember the early-Eighties when people on the east coast of Ireland had twenty foot aerials on their roofs to receive the four British channels and people further west thought those on the coast were privileged!
Then along came colour television and the arials had to go up to about fifty feet with a large array on the top!
The broadcast TV here in New Zealand is almost entirely unadulterated shite with frequent and long ad breaks. As a result we watch a lot of Youtube where a lot of the amateur stuff is well up to professional standards. We also have Netflix, Acorn and Beamafilm which means we can get as much good stuff as we wish without the annoying interruptions.
Another vote for amateur stuff on youTube. It’s even better with an ad blocker
Since we banned all piped in television (broadcast, cable, sat, etc) and stuck to watching movies and reading books, both being avid readers and judges of quality movies, our minds are kept duly entertained all year around. The only drawback to this is the “library” upstairs is becoming so stuffed with books, many hard cover, and our DVD/Blu-ray collection of movies is becoming so vast that I might have to build an extension onto the house just to contain all of them. It’s either that or sell and buy a bigger house.