TV news makes many sins of omission and other propaganda techniques are in there.
However, you often find much more propaganda, lifestyle propaganda, in other programs on TV.
This lifestyle propaganda is all about showing people what those that control the TV output believe to be acceptable behaviour.
Here we have a truly stunning example, with 4 adults ganging up to bully a 16 year old girl, and her father, who is watching, seems to be happy about it.
Thanks to whoever put this on Twitter. I took it from there yesterday but can’t remember from whom. If it was you leave a comment and I will put the link.
Anyway, to the business of it…
I have just finished reading David Attenborough’s Life on Air. It is not the kind of thing I normally read because I don’t like reading green room stories or memoirs about a life in TV. In fact, I don’t much like TV so as I said, it was an unusual choice for me but I felt David Attenborough is something of an exception so I determined to give it a go.
Before I get to the content, I should just say I bought the book in a shop in South England where I had a temporary job last summer. It was a charity shop and it had no price on it. I asked the woman how much it was and she replied, slightly surprised, “Oh, you’re very Scottish”.
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this. These possibilities leapt to mind…
Anyway, I have to say the book was an excellent read. Some of it seemed familiar because the documentary of the same name covers a lot of the material but most of the things in the documentary are covered in more depth in the book.
There is a bit of internal BBC politics but mostly from a bygone era and not enough to make you stop reading it. Everyone knows the wildlife documentaries but less people know about his spell as controller of BBC 2 and also Director of Programming for BBC television. The angle about these things in the book is that although in part interesting jobs, thse things eventually became distractions from his real desire to make wildlife programmes.
Although, having said that, the word wildlife doesn’t really cover it all because there have been plenty of Attenborough written/produced/narrated/commissioned programmes about geology, paleontology and anthropology too. He also mixes in some telling words about the worsening environmental crisis that threatens to destroy a large number of the species he has been filming.
Also, for a man with a fair number of royal titles to his name he seems to have a rather healthy disdain for the whole ridiculous merry-go-round. This is revealed in a couple of places, the first was how he tried to get out of being the man responsible for the Queen’s speech and the second I will come to.
With all these things in mind the book never really gets bogged down in one particular area. At the beginning there is a lot of in the pioneering days of nature filming stuff and it makes interesting reading when you consider who it is coming from. It seems that in the early days part of the point of the programs was to capture some of the animals for London Zoo although this practice seemed to die out fairly quickly.
When we move past that we get into landmark series such as Kenneth Baker’s Civilisation and others and then onto some of the more remarkable modern series that have been made.
The only thing that disappointed me in the book was that he didn’t directly address the issue of certain stations buying his documentaries and then editing out the references to evolution. I would have enjoyed reading his take on that.
So why this title about Rafflesia then? Well, Raffles the Gentlemen Thug was a very funny character in Viz Magazine. This character was basically a modern hooligan using victorian era language and the juxtaposition made it funny. Sentences like “My scarves are fashioned of the finest silk sir. Any man who suggests differently is a c*nt” are pretty memorable.
While I doubt that Attenborough is a reader of that magazine Attenborough wrote about the plant Rafflesia which produces the “largest unbranched inflorescence” (not the largest flower) in the world. The plant is a parasite which lives inside a host vine and the only visible part of it is the flower. Attenborough had this to say about it…
I am not one of those, like Aesop or Robert the Bruce, who readily derive moral precepts from the behaviour of animals, and I thought I would be even less likely to find them in the cycle of the life of plants, but Rafflesis did seem to me to provide a parable. One has to ask why this particular plant should produce the most extravangt and flamboyant of all flowers. It occured to me that Rafflesia does not work for its living. The vine itself has to build leaves and stems to produce its food and ultimately construct its flowers. But Rafflesia does not concern itself with such practical matters. It simply absorbs all the food it needs from its host. Indeed there is virtually no limit on how much it can take and no curb to its extravagance. So it can build the most grandiose of flowers. It is the aristocrat of the tropical forest plant community.
Does anyone else think that if there is a Democracy Live channel on BBC website then they should be at the Occupy Wall Street protests or somewhere similar instead of the Houses of Parliament?
A couple of years back I wrote a jokey article about the Scottish Omerta, namely watching Weir’s Way. I finished it with a plea for someone to stick some episodes on youtube.
For those of you who don’t know it, Weir’s Way was a program featuring nothing more than an amiable old man rambling about the Scottish countryside and speaking to folk whilst putting in a bit of geography, geology and history. To get a better feel for it, read the article I linked to in the first line of this.
Anyway, the good news is that someone has responded to the call and put a fair few episodes online. They are on this channel here (if you are looking around youtube then you could also take a peek at my channel too, which has nothing like Weir’s Way on it).
I’ve included an episode below here.
What other program could start with a line…
“Well, Kenmore is the liveliest village on the coast, population 20, and I am just in time to get out and see the fish being fed in the farm.”
He even mentions the word communism without foaming at the mouth or apologising.
In this one I also love the line “You are the only member of the cooperative”.
I recently watched a documentary that said ancient Chinese astrologers were often executed if they got it wrong.
Can you see where I am going with this already? Clever you. Or maybe you can predict the future?
Anyway, why not get a whole heap of them on to make their predictions and when they turn out to be nothing more than bullshit, which is an eventuality I am sure we can safely predict, punitive measures are applied.
Not only would this make for some good payback for all their nonsense but it would also lead to a subsequent reduction in the number of people claiming to have paranormal powers as most not many people would be willing to be ritually humiliated in this way.
It is a win-win situation.
Since product placement has been approved for British TV [except the BBC] I thought I would get in the spirit of things by trying a little on here…
Most TV is non-stop puerility. Most people understand that.
However, something that has been really sticking in my throat of late is how TV people and marketing departments seem to take either horrible or serious concepts and trivialise them so as to take any meaning the concept had away.
Examples..
1 – ‘Room 101’. Orwells room 101 was the worst place in the world. In short, it is the place where people are forced to face up to the one thing that psychologically can’t cope with. In the book for some people it was rats, for other people castration and so on.
This terrifying concept was changed to a show where celebrities came on and explained niggardly things that vaguely upset them.
2 – ‘Big Brother’. Orwells idea about an all-seeing, ever-present, brutal and totalitarian patriarch has been translated into a show that attention-seeking twats go on in order to make a name for themselves. What is disgusting about this is that the concept of big brother, like room 101, is horrendous. It was meant as a warning. It has now become a byword for banal and shallow nonsense. Most people in this country if you asked them what big brother was would say a TV show. That makes me sick.
The concept of total surveillance and totalitarian domination has been turned into a TV event that thousands of people actually APPLY for. That makes me even more sick.
3. Downsize Me – Downsizing means nothing other than making people redundant.
Making people redundant breaks up homes and families. People get evicted, children have less opportunities etc.
Downsize me has now become a plea for TV experts to come in and help you lose weight.
There are hundreds more examples but I would have to go channel hopping to get them and it would just depress me.
Any of you have more examples?
TV takes the life out of life.
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