Yet another change of scene - television
Thanks to the (dark) magic of television, you don't even need to leave your front room now to visit other places. Good news for those who like to watch travel and wildlife documentaries on their huge tellies, great news for those who like to chow down on a family bucket with about the same table manners displayed by the lions on the screen towards that dead zebra.
There are three broad worlds that you can visit through the idiot lantern portal. Entertainment. Education. Drama.
Entertainment usually comes in the form of a continuing series, or soap. This usually consists of the big three. There's Coronation Street, which follows the lives of residents of the seminal street in a fictional Northern town in, from what I can determine, is a fictional bloody universe where no real world actions, events or sometimes physical laws apply. I saw a few seconds of it the other night and the characters looked exactly the same as when I last watched it in the nineties, I had to check that I had not just hallucinated the last two decades in the time it took me to make a cup of tea. I had aged and owned an iPod. Result! The competition is Eastenders, sponsored by Dignitas, a programme so relentlessly harrowing that every single one of its episodes ends with a helpline number and a voice reminding you that if you have been affected by any of the issues, call this number. If the BBC ever went down the X Factor route and made it a quid a minute phone line job, they could abolish the license fee overnight. And fund a mission to Mars. Finally the is the soap set in the countryside. Don't watch that one, suspect its the soap equivalent of 'Horlicks', I suspect other people I dulce, but can't think what would drive me to.
Education usually boils down to some superb footage, in slow mo, of a killer whale biting the head off of a parrot or something, followed by a blistering row when it emerges the while thing was mocked up in an underwater aviary in Hull.
Drama. One word. Downton Abbey. The programme is without doubt a phenomenon, and an excellent example of escapist television, recalling as it does a simpler age, that didn't really exist, where the pace of life was slower and the inhabitants of grand houses had little to worry about save exploding through an excess of kedgeree, Bolsheviks in the shrubbery and succumbing to one of the three fates of the upper classes; pox, ostracisation, or getting your knob caught in a servant, leading to one or both of the others. Viewers want the best for the characters, which is pretty bloody noble, given that they live in a castle. I suppose that the suffering the characters go through, complicated love life upstairs, rickets downstairs, generates empathy. But also, really, who wound't like to like a big bloody house with booze, servants and Elizabeth MacGovern on hand?
There are three broad worlds that you can visit through the idiot lantern portal. Entertainment. Education. Drama.
Entertainment usually comes in the form of a continuing series, or soap. This usually consists of the big three. There's Coronation Street, which follows the lives of residents of the seminal street in a fictional Northern town in, from what I can determine, is a fictional bloody universe where no real world actions, events or sometimes physical laws apply. I saw a few seconds of it the other night and the characters looked exactly the same as when I last watched it in the nineties, I had to check that I had not just hallucinated the last two decades in the time it took me to make a cup of tea. I had aged and owned an iPod. Result! The competition is Eastenders, sponsored by Dignitas, a programme so relentlessly harrowing that every single one of its episodes ends with a helpline number and a voice reminding you that if you have been affected by any of the issues, call this number. If the BBC ever went down the X Factor route and made it a quid a minute phone line job, they could abolish the license fee overnight. And fund a mission to Mars. Finally the is the soap set in the countryside. Don't watch that one, suspect its the soap equivalent of 'Horlicks', I suspect other people I dulce, but can't think what would drive me to.
Education usually boils down to some superb footage, in slow mo, of a killer whale biting the head off of a parrot or something, followed by a blistering row when it emerges the while thing was mocked up in an underwater aviary in Hull.
Drama. One word. Downton Abbey. The programme is without doubt a phenomenon, and an excellent example of escapist television, recalling as it does a simpler age, that didn't really exist, where the pace of life was slower and the inhabitants of grand houses had little to worry about save exploding through an excess of kedgeree, Bolsheviks in the shrubbery and succumbing to one of the three fates of the upper classes; pox, ostracisation, or getting your knob caught in a servant, leading to one or both of the others. Viewers want the best for the characters, which is pretty bloody noble, given that they live in a castle. I suppose that the suffering the characters go through, complicated love life upstairs, rickets downstairs, generates empathy. But also, really, who wound't like to like a big bloody house with booze, servants and Elizabeth MacGovern on hand?
Labels: Downton Abbey, Media, Television
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