I am actually in the process of writing along post about various TV things viewed, with capsule reviews, but for some strange reason, I got suckered into watching two programmes tonight about safety. One was Panorama, about net safety for children. The other was a programme about road rage, and the competing needs of pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. The net one was Panorama and was presented in a hysterical hectoring style; the other was as far as I'm aware just a programme, lacking a 'banner'.
Obviously a lot of what is said about net safety needs to be said, even though it's common sense. Stuff like not allowing children to have web access in their bedrooms, for them to be told that that not everyone is how they seem on the net and so on. I know that it is pretty horrible to be deluged with obscenities, even as an adult, and I am under no illusion as to the length that a paedophile will go once they have their target. Even I, who consider myself to be worldly-wise was shocked at some 16 year old boy who had 'performed a sex act' on webcam for payment. Not that he did it, but that he seemed perfectly happy to tell this to random strangers, relatives, school friends and so on, via national TV. I think that's prostitution, isn't it?
The road rage programme showed the 'school run' in Hampstead. Hampstead, of course, is a very prosperous area of London. People pay a premium to live there, and then, so it seemed, they then all send their precious brats to fee-paying schools. And, of course, they have enormous cars to take them their. It was really quite hilarious. One man, who was titled 'doctor' (might be medical, might not be, if so, god help his patients) gets into an oversize vehicle with three children - not seat-belted - to take them 300 yards down the road, his excuse being they are too young to walk that far. I used to walk that distance to get to the bus stop for the school bus at age 5. I wonder about the precarious state of the marriages of these dreadful people. One woman was being confrontational with a traffic warden for her parking ticket - her reason being that if she gets too many parking tickets her husband stops it out of her clothes' money (I nearly fell off the sofa laughing).
But the best was some bloke in a Cherokee Jeep, He has been to anger management classes at his wife's insistence (my god, I want the back story - obviously guilty of domestic violence, wonder if it's 'just' the wife or also the kids he beats to a pulp). Having been to anger management classes the man was obviously trying very hard to control his rage - and failing. He was fuming at the bin lorry, he was fuming at a builder's lorry delivering. No doubt he would be livid if his rubbish wasn't collected, or his builders didn't deliver, and would go and beat the wife and kids, because it's only that, and the hilarious drug-dealer's car that make him feel like a 'real man'. He also said his wife doesn't like the car, basically she hates and mocks what it stands for. How I love to see the sheer misery the smug rich endure in order to maintain status. If someone wrote a fiction about his sort of person, they'd be accused of exaggeration, or creating a caricature, or having an agenda.
But what struck me with both programmes was an absence of personal responsibility and a mixture of ignorance and something tantamount to neglect that characterised both programmes. The underlying message of the first one being a wake-up call to the complacent, a gentle suggestion that while it might be modern and trendy to leave children to bring themselves up, it isn't actually wise. And in the second one, illustrating how these ghastly Hampstead types lacked the basic intelligence to understand that 'the problem' ie their perception of dangerous and over-crowded roads, and the very real examples of dangerous driving outside their expensive prep school, is not something that has happened in a vacuum, that they are absolutely part of the problem. Nor did any of them seem to have the native intelligence and wit to come up with a workable solution, just 'me, me, me'. Seriously, this is densely populated Hampstead, with, I think they said, 23 schools within a square mile. It's not the Outer Hebrides. And presumably those same children, who are being chauffeured around in the expensive penis-substitutes are exactly the same neglected children left to come across images of real penises on their bedroom-based computers supervised only by an immature underpaid 'Nanny' from Bulgaria or Bosnia while their callous, complacent, negligent parents carry on with their social climbing and posing.
It also made me laugh that these people agreed so readily to go on TV. They probably thought that it would be an opportunity to put their case, whatever their case is - widen the roads? flatten some houses? get everyone else in the same boat to kow-tow to 'me, me, me'. I would have thought that any halfway intelligent person would know by now the dangers of allowing 'documentary' TV to expose your inner moron. And yet, they keep doing it!
