The life of a peasant was famously, again in one of those columns, said to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. These days, the life of a poor person in the West is what? Boring, brutish and obese? Ears and eyes filled with bad telly and guts filled with bad food?
Perhaps it’s deliberate. By adding mass to the masses, they can’t rise up and overthrow the ruling classes because they can’t get off the sofa. Feed people enough chemicals and E numbers and they’ll settle into a state of such comatose apathy that only the sight of a Big Brother contestant actually exploding on television will wake them up (see REALITY TELEVISION). Or maybe the aliens who really rule the world are just fattening us up.
EUROVISION
Oh God oh God oh God oh God.
BBC VERSUS ITV
They were so different once. One was austere and grey and talked nicely and wanted us to better ourselves, but not too much in case we liked it and took over. The other was funny and vulgar and liked America and made a lot of noise and wanted us to win money and prizes and go mental. It was rather nice, like having two different aunts, one of whom always gave you a really dull book for Christmas but always looked after you, while the other gave you £20 and a PlayStation but was too pissed to make Christmas dinner. Between the two of them, they pretty much had things sorted out.
But now the differences between them seem to have blurred. The BBC has decided to become zippy and modern and have bad soaps (see AFTERNOON SOAPS and, worse, reality shows (see REALITY TELEVISION), and generally try to look like an ageing librarian out on the town with his nephews. Meanwhile, ITV have started making crappy crime dramas and Jane Austen adaptations (see JANE AUSTEN). These days the only way to tell them apart is that ITV game shows use a lot of blue lighting and BBC ones favour liberal use of red. Bit like party conferences, really.
EUROVISION 2
The thing is with the Eurovision contest … it’s where do we begin to tell the story of how crap a thing can be? For a start, what is ‘Eurovision’? Has anybody ever seen one? Is it a company? A technique? A pseudonym for one of the Transformers? Nobody seems to know, but it’s been around since the 1950s, so it’s probably a war crime. Only joking.
Secondly, whose idea was the Song Contest? Because if there’s one thing we can be absolutely sure about regarding the countries of Europe, it’s that you don’t want to be stirring up national rivalries with that lot. These are countries who’ve gone to war over the most trivial matters – the shooting of an Archduke; the question of who’s got the real Pope – so having a contest based on something really important like music is bordering on madness.
In fact, the main criterion for joining would appear to be that your nation has recently been involved in a bloody conflict. So when the Contest started, it was all the people who’d been in the last big war. Then in the 1960s and 70s new sites of violence like Israel and Cyprus got involved. And after that? Serbia, Bosnia, places like that. One can only surmise that Estonia got in by lying to the selection panel and claiming to have had a war that nobody saw happen.
EUROVISION 3
And the big ‘joke’ of Eurovision – the thing that made us Brits watch even when it was really, really awful? It was the idea that everyone else was rubbish, and even though our entries (Cliff) were also rubbish, they were less rubbish than the foreigners’ stuff, and so we could simultaneously put forward rotten songs and sneer at other people for doing the same.
Because we kept winning. Fairly often. (All right, we didn’t beat Abba, but we surely knew how to rip them off – Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz, and so on.) And as long as we were winning, that was all right. Britain is, after all, the greatest pop-and-roll nation in the world, apart from America, who aren’t allowed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.
So we were also allowed to find everything hilarious because we were the best and everyone else was crap. But then something happened. Two things happened, in fact. First of all, the Europeans started getting better. They entered people who could write songs. They had catchy Eurodisco tunes. And they discovered wit (remember that Finnish death-metal band? Noël Coward couldn’t have done it better.)
The other thing that happened – the really awful yet totally predictable thing – was that we went rubbish. We started entering acts that were even worse than, say, Doctor Who in the 1980s. We completely lost the plot. By 2007 you could have entered some human hair in a box and it would have been better than the official British entry.
The solution seems obvious. We must either find someone who can write some decent songs – not easy, in this country – or withdraw gracefully, citing a musical headache of national proportions. Because soon, very soon, Terry Wogan will have nothing to take the piss out of. And that’s got to be wrong.
TV TALENT SHOWS
Note the use of the word ‘talent’. These shows exist as much to display lack of talent as they do ability. And the sight of the ‘judges’ – dull, scripted people who are only there to scrape a bit of money out of the soon-to-be discarded husks of the performers – telling the hopefuls that they are no good is appalling. The judges’ sole qualification for the job is vanity and the ability to talk in clichés that someone else has written for them. Artificial, stiff, egotistical and dull, they make the manufactured groups they represent look organic and thrilling.
TV TALENT SHOWS 2
Worst of all, this kind of drosswallop is a throwback to the days before fun. Talent shows may well go back hundreds of years, but so what? So does smallpox. It’s as though, as the music industry dies (see DEATH OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY), it acts like that computer in 2001 and reverts to its long-distant youth, dropping all claims to hipness and just being some last naff, desperate Tin Pan Alley attempt to hoick a few groats off the hoi polloi.
CHAT SHOWS – THEN
The Americans seem to have started them. They were always the same. After some gabbling from an invisible man, a bloke in a 70s suit (well, it was the 1970s, fair enough) would come on to the set to the kind of applause that surely only the Second Coming would merit, tell some ‘jokes’ that were really just newspaper headlines rejigged, and then talk to the band leader, who was sycophantic in a way that would have worried Uriah Heep. Then he would interview three famous people, one at a time. (‘Interview’ in this context does not mean grill, debrief or even extract useful information from. It means ‘praise excessively and encourage to promote their latest project’.) Sometimes there would be a band. Always there would be a commercial break.
In Britain – and presumably other countries – this model was not taken up, because in them days all chat shows were on the BBC and the BBC was not the kind of place where you came on and told jokes (see THE BBC VERSUS ITV). The British chat show was therefore a reverential affair, with frequent apologies for being too personal and lots of pauses for the host to laugh his face off at some God-awful showbiz anecdote.
It was horrible, but what replaced it, amazingly, was worse.
CHAT SHOWS – NOW
They’re not what they were,