a classic piece of TV and what happens?
Some stupid bint comes on and drowns out the last scene by rabbiting on about what’s on next.
Taped the classic Channel4 adaptation of Tom Sharpe’s “Porterhouse Blue” from 1987, broadcast to celebrate 25 years of the channel – but of course shown on More4 and not the actual celebrating channel itself, not enough z-list “celebs” and certainly not dumbed down enough for C4 these days.
Watched it back in the day (remember when John Sessions used to never be off our screens?) and laughed then as now but back then you didn’t miss any scenes with a muppet announcer talking over scenes saying what’s on next, just in case you missed the big banner that flashed onto the screen saying exactly the same thing during the show which of course is followed up by one half of your telly being taken up with it when the credits are rolling squashed up on one side.
You’d think it was hard to find out what is on TV these days, yeah there’s more channels now but you’ve got all kinds of listing magazines, it’s in every paper, you’ve got Teletext/Ceefax for the old TVs and EPG for new tellies.
Does anyone need these announcements? Does anyone like them? Is there any point in complaining to them, reading letters to the TV companies the answer is no they come out with all the excuses for it and anything that people repeatedly and reasonably complain about (I’m not talking the Mary Whitehouse brigade here).
But then TV companies have got to find ways of wasting money, especially the public funded ones, why spend cash on things like intelligent documentaries, dramas etc when you can throw it away on people who can read out loud. How many of these idiots are required and if they are actually required wouldn’t it be handy if they could pronounce the station they work for, when all you have to do is read out loud you think they’d be able to handle a four letter word like “film”, I’ve yet to find a letter “u” in it.
The bosses at the B.B.C. want to make cuts because their handout wasn’t big enough for their ambition, well it would be easy to do, cut out all those high salaries to no marks like Graham Norton – don’t know what’s worse the Beeb spending all that on him and not using him that much or if they had used him on everything. Cut out all the “news presenters”, do we really need two grinning ninnies sitting there reading the news out loud from an autocue . Natasha Kerplunk goes to five – what was it about the million pounds that first attracted you to five Ms. Kerplunk? – a good start now get rid of all the other banalities.
There’s no need for more than one person to front the news broadcasts, there’s also no need for all the damn reporters, such as in the Madeleine McCann case we’ve got some muppet at their UK home and another out in Portugal both telling us exactly what an “expert” in the studio waffled about 30 seconds earlier the latter doing so with an idiot board behind them. Ah yes when Billy Connolly did his “Audience with…” all those years back, when he was funny, he took the piss out of those that did the weather – “this is the country where you live” – little did we know that we’d get the same thing from the so called news journalists a few years down the line.
Back when it was just one individual like Kenneth Kendall, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon & Richard Baker they managed on their own and yes we were more naive and less questioning in those days but they were more trustworthy, can’t say that about them now.
Did a survey the other day about viewing habits and at the end the bloke said “you won’t be surprised to learn but this is on behalf of the B.B.C.”, I wasn’t and I wasn’t when he said nobody he had questioned marked them above 5 out of 10 for honesty and being trustworthy, I gave them a two and I was being generous as is my nature 😉 .
Another pet peeve is during documentaries when the presenter is talking about something he/she is watching but the picture we get is of them, why not let us see the damn thing they’re describing and cut out the middle man, ah that’s right your salary probably wouldn’t be so big if you didn’t get your phizog on the screen 🙄
This post was brought to you by the number 4 and the phrase “read out loud”.