I have had two comments from someone giving the name Adrian Chiles and an email address (not published) that could potentially be Adrian Chiles. I once had a comment from Peaches Geldof. And Mike T-D once had a comment from a Lithuanian Eurovision entry.
Selina Scott's views on TV were covered in the TV go home, and will be aired on Five tonight.
I tend to agree with her, especially the part about
TV is, to her, ageist and sexist, run by paunchy male executives with a taste for cruelty and a lairy, childish idea of what makes entertainment; a place where reality shows encourage us to ridicule freaks, where everything is sacrificed to football, where news looks like a game show, where soaps have replaced character and warmth with midriffs and addiction, and where the best opportunities available to women in their fifties are to eat cockroaches in the jungle and be thought of as a good sport.
Thing is, though, that sort of TV gets a disproportionately high, if dwindling, share of a dwindling TV audience, and is a surefire winner commercially. People who watch intellectually challenging, iconoclastic and controversial* documentaries or dramas, do so because they want their thoughts to be provoked. This does not make them especially good at absorbing the guff in the adverts, because the adverts want to sell a range of emotions from guilt to envy to self-delusion, without people actually thinking "Will this lotion make me happy, or this food stuff that is packed full of salt make me thin or this leather sofa give me self-esteem?" And while we worry about consumer goods and thinness and not-ageing, and Victoria Beckham's handbag, we don't think about power relations, exploitation and capitalist brainwashing, so we don't have the knowledge or time to question them, thus ensuring that a self-appointed self-perpetuating elite continues to undermine our self-worth and our enjoyment of the things that matter. Add in the airheads in the newspapers who tell us what TV to watch - not because they have the capacity to make a critical judgement but because they lack the integrity to say they've been bribed to puff a show, and it all pays off as the newspapers advertise the TV programmes that hook people into the adverts that are created by white male 'creatives' in advertising agencies with the sole purpose of getting people to spend money on the High Street, money they can ill-afford so they borrow at usurious rates, which keeps the financial institutions happy.
* ie saying things that can be argued with, not just using swear words or revealing usually-covered flesh
