"In the future", said Andy Warhol in 1968, "everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." He has been quoted and re-quoted on this as celebrity culture has grown exponentially ever since. These 15 minute celebrities certainly seem to find their audience in Britain as the average household owns 4.7 televisions, and the average Brit spends 26 hours a week watching TV. We are a nation of sofa louts and channel flickers, slaves to the remote controlled deity. We spend more time watching television than any other activity other than sleeping.
What makes this statistic even more worrying is a brief flick through the tv guide. It is packed with shows like X factor, Dragon’s Den, Popstars and The Apprentice which all seem to follow a common theme. What people really want to see at tea-time it seems, is someone else being the victim of a tirade of abuse and insults from someone richer and more succesful than themselves.
Elsewhere Jimmy Carr lingers menacingly over the telly schedule like a moon-faced harbinger of the cultural apocalypse, quiping one liners in between counting down the public’s 100 favourite films, comedy moments, car crashes and high-school shootings.
And at the very bottom of the tv guide in small print is perhaps the most sinister of all, the late-night game show in which the only contestants are those gullible enough to ring in for a pound a minute. The presenter (who is the love-child of a Butlins redcoat and Lucifer himself) nervously fills time as he or she waits for the winning caller, telling unrelated anecdotes and repeating the mantra "it could be your lucky night! Dave from Staines phoned in earlier tonight and won £500".
Poor Dave from Staines, lonely, bored and brainless enough to phone in, but lucky enough to escape with the cash. Spare a thought for those poor dejected others sitting alone in glum hope, their phones on constant re-dial, the pale glow of the tv illuminating their faces, bent with the torment that they know the glaringly obvious missing word in the pyramid, but are unable to get through.
This is the sad truth of television in the infancy of the 21st century, it’s all about making the most money, spending the least and assuming every viewer is an ADD sufferer with an IQ of 49. With a few hidden treasures, movies and sports programmes aside, the programmes above or ones of a similar ilk constitute the majority of the sceduling. The rest is simply panel games, property shows, programmes telling people they’re wearing the wrong clothes, programmes telling people they eat too much, aren’t fit to look after their own children, their house is filthy and they drink too much, but strangely enough none telling them they watch too much television.
It has become a cliché to criticize the Hello and Heat culture of celebrity kiss and tell and reality tv, but there is something terribly wrong with a world in which people with ideas to change things for the better and people who can educate and enliven others are overlooked in favour of people who are famous simply for being famous, or famous for being related to someone famous or famous for once having brushed past Jodie Marsh in a nightclub toilet. With this century comes the death of ideas and content. With the technology of YouTube and widespread digital tv comes the saturization of of what got people watching in the first place.
Maybe there’s a better way to spend those 26 hours a week, reading, going outside or dare I say it coming into contact with other people. So please remember to switch off your set, and for added fire protection, unplug it from the socket. Good night.
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