MARK’S TV: Switch Off Reality
It’s amazing what your TV can do these days isn’t it? Just over a decade ago, the telly was still an imposing plastic monolith. Sat brooding in the corner of the room, its cathode ray tube stretching back like a funeral procession, the average TV was an immovable object (It was too damn heavy) whose only real secondary feature was as a learning tool for all ages, and a test of brute strength.
Nowadays though, all new television sets should really come with an official endorsement from the Swiss army. There are specialist channels, specialist channels, channels where everything runs an hour late and you can watch Jeremy Kyle without having to be up before the ungodly hour of 10am (thus also missing This Morning, which is always a result) and channels for people who are scared of real porn and would rather watch faintly angry butterfaces (ask Google) gyrating to the asthmatic breathing of middle aged men who’ve called in and are desperately resisting the urge to try out novel new uses for their neck-ties. Increasingly there is also the option to buy a TV with the internet (and its various catch-up services, such BBC iPlayer) built in, and if you’re willing to take a punt on relatively new technology you can grab your plastic specs and splash out on a 3D telly.
All very impressive I’m sure you’ll agree, and all light years away from what was thought of as possible even ten/fifteen years ago, but the most useful and satisfying feature on my telly this month, and I suspect for the subsequent months leading to 2012, has been there since the earliest days of ‘our friend in the corner’. Its relatively small, it’s simple yet effective and it’s so common it has its own universal symbol. Oh and it makes the whole screen warp and change in a fraction of a second. It is of course, the off switch. And with the schedules as they are I’m sure we’ll be using it a lot more.
The trouble is we used to have four sensible, well defined seasons in the year; Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, each easily defined not only by month but weather conditions (or to put it another way, whether it rains ‘a lot’ or ‘fuck loads’). Now though, global warming has warped the weather and TV has screwed the seasons. We don’t have Winter any more, we have ‘Reality’, an oppressive, inescapable season at the end of the year where the airwaves are heavy with the weight of utter dirge and the programming schedules are more predictable than a high street shop’s December in-store music playlist. It is the advent of ’Reality’ which is likely to see the off-button crowned as the most beloved of all TV features.
Traditionally, ‘Reality’ stretches from mid-August until April, taking in X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing On Ice (the first horseman of this annual cultural apocalypse is usually the X-Factor, but this year it was narrowly pipped to the post by the shambling, worm ridden corpse of Celebrity Big Brother.), and although that’s been the norm for the better part of a decade now, the sheer enormity of reality TV’s span never fails to amaze me. For example, It’s hard to believe that by the time the latest round of warbling wannabes have finished crying rivers through ITV’s studios, and the Strictly Come Dancing has mercifully fox trotted off into the sunset (its executives breathing a sigh of relief that nobody has yet realised that Bruce Forsyth operates entirely through a complex puppetry system), It’ll only be a few days before Christmas. Yes, HMV will actually have a CD in stock and the nation’s old biddies will have nothing more to natter about until Dancing on Ice starts, but we will have all lost a third of the year, not to mention more brain cells than most of us can afford.
Big Brother may have been granted an unwarranted reprieve, but in reality TV terms it’s the exception to the rule. Usually, dead is dead. There’s a shelf life for every single one of these shows, an unseen expiration date which will see them perish in one of several ways; they’ll either be complete flops and peter out naturally, become celebrity obsessed (Fame Academy), be usurped by a newer show (Pop Idol) or get so big and bloated that they eventually implode like a dying star. The latter hasn’t yet happened, simply because no show has ever reached that point. The returning X-Factor though, is looking dangerously close.
Like most people, I’ve tried liking X-Factor and lord knows I’ve tried hating it, but my overriding feeling toward it is an incredible weariness. I’m sick of knowing how an act will do from the first few bars of the music played in their pre-audition interview, I’m sick of the audition songs being largely owned by Sony, I’m sick of the attempts at street cred and I’m sick of all the previous winners coming back to thank Simon Cowell. Mostly though, I’m sick of being sick of these things.
Like most people now, I know how the show works, I know what they look for, how they make their money and how they search for a niche for the eventual winner to fill, but I know if I turn it on I’ll be drawn in out of morbid curiosity. All of which is why, despite the revamped judging panel and all the totally un-shocking twists which are sure to come, I’ve turned to our old friend the off-switch on Saturday nights. Now I can enjoy my Saturdays in peace, safe in the knowledge that when new judge Tulisa and her band-mates in N-Dubz inevitably perform their latest single live, and the BBC wheel out Bruce Forsyth for Strictly Come Dancing, I’ll know I made the right choice.
