Current plans to cut ITV’s obligations as a public service broadcaster would mean it’d have no need to fill the cracks in its open-the-box, come-on-down schedules every night with regional news programmes.
That would be excellent. I loathe regional news programmes. They’re always full of fat women wearing “Save our school” T-shirts that they’ve hurriedly pulled on over their normal clothes for the cameras, and pointless vox pops, and puffed-up councillors and green issues and plans for incinerators and recycled press releases, delivered with a solemn voice by a woman in an ethnic headscarf, in a bid to give them credence and weight.
However, while the demise of Grantham Today is a cause for celebration, I do believe this is yet another rivet removed from the aeroplane wings of civilisation, and soon you’ll turn on Newsnight to find Jeremy Paxman in clown shoes urging parties from either side of the political divide to settle their differences in a bout of mud wrestling.
Sadly I believe that television mirrors society. It was in black and white because we were. It made fun of West Indians when we did. It featured Terry Scott because we told lame jokes as well, and when we went to the pub, we didn’t like all that “foreign muck” on the menu either.
This is the problem with what’s happening today. Because anyone with half a brain and speech genes that function properly is derided as a hoity-toity snob, all of television is aimed at the Heat-reading halfwits who literally don’t know anything.
We celebrate our ignorance of the Large Hadron Collider, we make sneery noises when someone from Fulham appears on a game show, and as a result, when we tune in to BBC1 on a Saturday night, Vanessa Feltz is being pushed into a swimming pool because she can’t lie on the floor with her legs wide apart.
At the moment, television companies imagine that they must cater to the bovine masses or else their viewing figures and advertising revenue will dwindle to nothing. They know that when Jade Goody gets cancer the nation mourns and when Stephen Hawking speaks everyone laughs.
That would be excellent. I loathe regional news programmes. They’re always full of fat women wearing “Save our school” T-shirts that they’ve hurriedly pulled on over their normal clothes for the cameras, and pointless vox pops, and puffed-up councillors and green issues and plans for incinerators and recycled press releases, delivered with a solemn voice by a woman in an ethnic headscarf, in a bid to give them credence and weight.
However, while the demise of Grantham Today is a cause for celebration, I do believe this is yet another rivet removed from the aeroplane wings of civilisation, and soon you’ll turn on Newsnight to find Jeremy Paxman in clown shoes urging parties from either side of the political divide to settle their differences in a bout of mud wrestling.
Sadly I believe that television mirrors society. It was in black and white because we were. It made fun of West Indians when we did. It featured Terry Scott because we told lame jokes as well, and when we went to the pub, we didn’t like all that “foreign muck” on the menu either.
This is the problem with what’s happening today. Because anyone with half a brain and speech genes that function properly is derided as a hoity-toity snob, all of television is aimed at the Heat-reading halfwits who literally don’t know anything.
We celebrate our ignorance of the Large Hadron Collider, we make sneery noises when someone from Fulham appears on a game show, and as a result, when we tune in to BBC1 on a Saturday night, Vanessa Feltz is being pushed into a swimming pool because she can’t lie on the floor with her legs wide apart.
At the moment, television companies imagine that they must cater to the bovine masses or else their viewing figures and advertising revenue will dwindle to nothing. They know that when Jade Goody gets cancer the nation mourns and when Stephen Hawking speaks everyone laughs.
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