Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap. David Quantick

a while. Unfortunately, they’re still doing it, and some of the hosts have been doing it for so long – sending up guests, mocking the format, and so forth – that the viewer just wonders why they’re still doing it if they hate it that much, and changes channels.

      In Britain, as ever, the format was adapted. The new chat shows here had the same mixture of irony and mockery but, with few exceptions, what they also had was a lethal combination of rubbish hosts and worse guests. So instead of the biggest stars in Hollywood being ribbed by the best stand-ups in the world, here you had a ‘star’ you’d never heard of – being mildly insulted by the bloke who’d come fourth in the Perrier Awards three years ago. It wasn’t the same.

      And yet, instead of shooting the format and hurriedly kicking it under the carpet, TV bosses stuck with it, believing (wrongly) that they could put any old TV presenter (see TV PRESENTERS) or useless comic or radio DJ into the host’s chair and it would be fine. It’s not fine. It’s never fine.

      ANTIQUES SHOWS

      They used to be sort of forums where middle-class people would go and be reassured. Now they are used, brilliantly and wrongly, as afternoon fillers. Beefy couples in ill-fitting sweatsuits are forced to go to markets in the rain to look at bits of old lamps and one-eyed stuffed rats. Worse, they are made to hang around with bowtie-faced professional patronizers who apparently make a living running antique shops. The whole thing is not only deeply depressing but also encourages people to buy as much old toot as possible in the vain, dead hope that one day it will be worth a spillion quid. Such things can destroy the morale of a nation.

      GADGET SHOWS

      Wow. Here’s a man who’d like to be younger than he is. Here’s a woman who’d like to be working on another show and any show will do so long as the man who’d like to be younger than he is won’t be on it. Here’s a set so cheap you can see through it. And here’s the pitch! They review brand-new gadgets. Wow again. By ‘reviewing’ they mean ‘talking about’ and ‘pressing the buttons on’, and by ‘brand-new gadgets’ they mean ‘any old rubbish a pretend Japanese company has got lying around the office’. And this is the future.

      BREAKFAST TELEVISION

      Who thought it would be a good idea to have television before toast? In American movies we sometimes see people having a coffee and a waffle while watching glamorous presenters interviewing Hollywood stars before 9 a.m. In Britain we have slightly mad-looking people who don’t seem to have had enough sleep interviewing, well, each other. This isn’t too bad – it is, after all, one of the central planks of entertainment – but before you’ve had your boiled egg? It seems excessive.

      POP TELLY

      It’s over. All the great shows that glided on the ocean of telly when the world was young have been cancelled. The basic idea of getting the groups in to mime and smile to their hits – a fantastic, art-school concept that if it had been thought of by a Slade (the art school, not the group) graduate would be winning prizes everywhere – has been superseded by not one but three rotten things.

      1. The idea that television has to be real. So instead of having top bands pretend to perform what is, after all, the ideal version of their song – i.e. the one they spent eight squillion dollars and three years recording – they get them to perform it live. That is, out of tune and out of breath with rotten sound through cheap TV speakers.

      2. The idea that just seeing people sing a song is not enough. So instead of seeing some people sing a song, we get some bad director’s rehash of either a film he saw when he was high on skunk, or some dancing women in their underwear smiling as the pop star walks out pretending to mumble.

      3. Similar to point 1, but even more horrid, the televised live concert. Not only does this have the demerit of being out of tune, and so forth, but also it means that a) you get an audience singing along and waving their mobile phones at the camera (see MOBILE PHONES) and b) instead of seeing the band do their hit and shove off, you have to sit through all their other songs as well, which is no fun whatsoever. And – just to add injurious insult to insulting injury – they project their new video behind themselves so as to remind the younger set what they are enduring.

      REALITY TELEVISION

      The bastard who came up with the title Big Brother for a reality show may be more cynical than previously advertised. Because if there’s one thing that perfectly sums up your 1984-style Orwellian prolefeed culture, it’s the replacement of actual real content with made-up stuff. Newspapers and news-media stuff were originally designed to transmit information about events that had happened largely uncontrollably – wars, famines, earthquakes. Now they just tell us the adventures of someone who passed an audition. And by audition, they don’t mean a display of performing skill, they mean ‘were prepared to show off their personality disorder in public’.

      In 1984, the news channels showed footage from possibly made-up wars, interchangeable names of adversaries, and randomly selected hate figures. These days I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is our Oceania, the Big Brother house is Airstrip One, and Heat magazine is alternately the Ministry of Love and Hate Week.

      REALITY TELEVISION 2

      And it’s not real. Reality TV is the news – i.e. real things happening to real people in real places. Unless life is all staged for the benefit of some higher power and the world’s a stage and so forth, there isn’t anyone with a script going, ‘And cue the economic collapse of Mali!’ or similar. Whereas Reality TV is, if not completely staged (and any television worker will tell you, if plied with strong drugs, that every show is as manipulated and directed as possible), then as carefully planned as possible, from the cast (contestants) to the storyline (introducing new people and challenges).