Perv Operas

I'm not a prude, not by a long chalk, nor am I one of the new puritans, but I've finally given up on the last couple of soap operas I've been watching. Yes I admit to enjoying watching soaps, TV isn't there for intellectual challenge or stimulation it's for entertainment but the soaps are no longer entertaining.

I'm not sure which started pissing me off first, Radio 4's The Archers or the BBC's EastEnders. The Archers is now a ludicrous parody of what it used to be with more social problems and misfits than the most depressed inner city suburb in the worst modern city. The Archers has been hijacked by victim obsessed social justice warriors who are now the only people who listen. Likewise EastEnders, very BBC.

Now then, on to Coronation Street. Here's a quick idea of the characters now inhabiting one small street known as Corrie:

A gay vicar who is now a heroin addict.
A gay bloke who works for a dodgy legal firm.
A gay bloke who is as camp as a row of tents.
A gay mechanic who is about to date rape a heterosexual character.
A gay woman who cleans windows.
A gay woman who is the daughter of a factory owner.
A gay Muslim woman who is married to a Muslim bloke.
There was a transgendered 'woman', now shuffled off the mortal coil, who was obviously a woman playing the role quite unconvincingly, far too much like a real woman.

Then there are any number of unfaithful, multi-married/divorced heterosexuals, not to mention numerous murderers over the years and several disasters such as gas explosions and trams crashing off the viaduct onto the street. Recently there was the most convoluted attempt at a racist murder that turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with race, as we all knew, but the writers had to clamber on a very rickety bandwagon that was verging on farcical.

So if that urban nightmare isn't for you you decide to forget about the numerous disasters to befall the place, such as planes and helicopters crashing onto the residents, and you move to the Yorkshire Dales and the picturesque village of Emmerdale. Big mistake, here is, from memory, a list of characters living in Emmers:

A gay lad who owns a scrapyard and has found his younger sister who has recently snogged another young female character.
A gay bloke who married the above then got a female character pregnant, left his 'husband' but is now back playing happy families with him and the poor little offspring.
A gay doctor popped into the village for a few months while the 'husband' and 'husband' were split up.
A gay vet who seduced her previously heterosexual boss.
A pub owner who has slept with most of the men in the village, as well as Leeds and Bradford, but is now having a passionate lesbian fling with above vet.

The heterosexual people in the village are mostly unfaithful and several times divorced. Watch out for tedious times in this one because it usually means a cull of characters by mass murder or a whopping great disaster. If urban and rural life really was like this, rather than booming, our population would be shrinking as millions of us fled for more peaceful lives in somewhere like Syria or Afghanistan.

No wonder they warn you at the beginning of these soaps that you might find them disturbing and offer helpline numbers at the end for anybody disturbed by the content.

TV, The Modern Freak Show

I'm not one of those people who thinks television is evil and satanic, I do watch TV. But I don't subscribe to Sky because Freeview gives you enough channels full of pap without paying for even more channels full of pap.

I love sport but prefer to watch it live and therefore spend a long time away from my beloved watching football, cricket and, whenever I can, ice hockey. So to sit watching sport at home on TV would be a little too much for her to accept, which I fully appreciate, so don't have any sports channels.

But I am increasingly disconcerted at the amount of seriously weird stuff on TV. I thought that was what the internet had been invented for.

It started with the soaps and their little announcements at the end of an episode that if you have been affected by the storyline here's a telephone number for The Samaritans or whoever. Do the TV companies not think that if a storyline leads to people needing a helpline then perhaps it should not be aired in the first place? Having said that maybe there are a lot of feeble people in the country and it's not the fault of the TV companies at all, I don't know. I do know that Corrie has yet to make me run out of the room screaming for help, maybe I'm just not very sensitive.

But then there are the seriously sick TV programmes themselves. I saw one series advertised recently that was all about ugly people trying to get dates. I don't mean people who were just a little plain or perhaps not 'your type', but people who were seriously deformed verging on grotesque. Tonight there is a programme on about women who are seriously fat and pander to the fetishes of some seriously weird men. When I say 'fat' I don't mean a bit chunky, I mean rolls of fat hanging down to their knees.

Bloody hell, this is 2012. If people were to read about these freaks being paraded through the streets in the middle ages, or the nineteenth century for entertainment they'd tut tut and thank God we are now so much more civilised. Except that would be hypocritical as we now don't even have to go to the village square, the freak shows are piped straight into our own lounges. Are we really as civilised as we like to think we are? I don't fall for this bull about it being educational, it's not, it's pure voyeurism of the worst sort.

And don't even get me started on that sickest of all TV freak shows, the televising of Parliament.

Broadcasting, Diversity and Funny Accents

It's that time of year when the nights are getting shorter but it's grey and wet, so our thoughts turn to holidays. If you are planning to holiday in Spain I wonder what pictures you get in your mind when you dream about your holiday. Is it brilliant sunshine, blue sea, white sand, sangria, tapas, flamenco and a background of high mountains against a deep blue horizon? Or is it a picture of brilliant sunshine, white sand, Big Ben's Pub, Ye Cockney Fish and Chip Shop, horrendous music booming from grubby bars selling best bitter and fat men in Union Jack shorts, earrings and England replica shirts stretched so tight they resemble tattoos?

The truth is you are likely to find an element of both, the degree dependent on where you choose, and that depends on your knowledge of Spain. Personally I would never venture within ten miles of Salou ever again after experiencing two foul nights there a few years back. I'm sure most of us dream of the sangria, flamenco and tapas option rather than the fat beer belly in an England shirt. Does that make us racist? I suggest not.

For the same reason I don't think the TV series Midsomer Murders is racist, to suggest it is displays a seriousness and lack of imagination bordering on the mentally ill. The people who have suspended Brian True-May, the producer from his job should be sacked and kept safely away from real people, until they lighten up.

Midsomer Murders is set in a fictional, caricature English rural setting where people in one village think those from the village two miles away are dangerous outsiders, to be avoided at all costs and kept at a distance because they only arrived two hundred years ago. Brian True-May's only sin is in stating it in plain terms in an interview, rather than couching it in mealy mouthed politically correct platitudes.

On another level it is a stylised twenty first century version of what many would dream of as being a typical Cotswold village, or a small town in North Yorkshire or any other quaint rural location. I bet when people dream of those typical English places they don't imagine a mosque at one end of the main street, a Buddhist Temple at the other, a few West Indians on one street, a few Indians on another. The local plumber is a Pole and the doctor a German with a thriving West African community outnumbering white English Anglicans at the fifteenth century parish church. No, they will have a vision of something like the villages in Midsomer Murders. That does not make it racist.

Television is entertainment. What next, an attack on the violence in Midsomer Murders as over 150 people have been murdered in a few short years in one small cluster of villages in the sleepy English countryside? Do we white English people claim that it depicts white people, especially middle class white people, as full of avarice, greed and murderous urges? It's called the suspension of disbelief, now get on with it and stop taking life so bloody seriously.

But while we're at it the use of ever more harsh local and regional accents on TV and radio has naused me off for a few years now. I don't mind strong accents when they add to the programme. If they all spoke like the Queen in Coronation Street and Eastenders it just wouldn't ring true. But continuity announcers, and those in non-drama TV and radio productions should not have accents that detract from the programme.

 Neil Nunes is a case in point. He is a continuity announcer on BBC Radio 4. He has such a rich, deep Jamaican accent that for a second you think the dial on youir radio has moved. I like his accent, but it detracts from what you actually need to hear, as do any strong accents on TV and radio. Now don't get me wrong, I have a strong regional accent and love the range of regional acccents we have in this country, but there are times when it is just not appropriate. I feel the same about overly strong Northern English accents, Irish, Scots or Welsh accents, it's not a racial thing nor is it snobbery. I'm not calling for an absurd BBC pronunciation a la Lord Reith, just a reasonable accent and pronunciation that do not detract from what's being communicated.

The problem with the BBC is that years ago it forgot it was a broadcaster, and has been desperately wasting resources and patronising us as the most heavily state subsidised social engineering outfit the world has ever seen. I hope this article indicates that they may be finally realising that we don't want to be treated like idiots being lectured by a supercilious headmaster any longer.

The one I really can't bare to listen to at the moment is Professor Brian Cox. Every time I hear his voice I think it's Mark Lawrenson. It disturbs me.