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May 12, 2005
Contentless Article
In my continuing quest to find alternative employment as a writer, I found this piece on the BBC interesting. It's just over 400 words, and is almost contentless as far as I can see. so I asked a friend to give me a topic, and I decided to see if I could come up with something similar. It appears to have come out as more of a rant than anything, but that's just me I guess.
What is happening to Saturday Night TV
In olden days, well, maybe not that long ago - let's pick the 1970s and 1980s as an example, watching TV was almost compulsory on a Saturday night. There is a lot of talk of the Golden Age of light entertainment. We had The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, The Black and White Minstrel Show. Cilla Black had a slot too with studio guests and live outside broadcasts, a bit like the stuff Noel Edmonds did in the 1990s. The audience figures for those shows was huge, but what a lot of people forget is that they were largely rubbish, and there just wasn't any alternative for people. If you've managed to erase 'Seaside/Summertime Special' from your memory, sorry, I'm reminding you now.
The days of sitting round the piano singing songs with the family happily passed long before I was born. Watching TV is what you did on a Saturday night as a kid. Until that is you realised that your parent's stress levels weren't really high enough and you discover discos, clubs and pubs. The TV companies didn't have any real competition for children and their parents, and so shoved out any old dross they wanted, and the cheaper the better.
Perusing my TV schedule for this weekend however, I see that there has been a sea change of vast proportions. Instead of three channels we have five. Instead of Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy, we have a proper actor in Christopher Ecclestone in the excellently revamped Dr Who. Instead of The Professionals or Starsky and Hutch, there is CSI and Law and Order. Sale of the Century is gone, and Millionaire has real tension and bigger prizes. Of course it's not all wine and roses, I'm scared to even turn on Strictly Dance Fever in case I'm forced to gouge out my own eyes (or is that ears). But the general quality is higher, and there are alternatives for different tastes, from drama in Casualty, to sport in a World championship fight.
What has prompted this improvement? It's got to be the competition. Cable and satellite TV give us hundreds of other channels. Playstation and XBox mean the TV is multi purpose now too. Wobbling a loose memory pack on a Sinclair ZX81 so that you can type in Basic computer programs from a magazine is a distant memory. Games now are fully immersive experiences with Dolby5.1 surround sound. Your DVD player also provides real quality with movies available a mere 13 weeks after their cinema releases in some cases.
In the 70s and 80s, when I had no choice at all, I watched The Russ Abbot Show, and thought it was good. So now, when there is so much choice, Saturday night TV finally gets good, and it makes me sick.
Posted by se71 at May 12, 2005 11:18 AM
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