{"id":1077,"date":"2005-04-10T16:00:49","date_gmt":"2005-04-10T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2005\/04\/the_state_of_tv\/"},"modified":"2005-04-10T16:00:49","modified_gmt":"2005-04-10T16:00:49","slug":"the_state_of_tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/the_state_of_tv\/","title":{"rendered":"The State of TV Reviewing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know that I’ve moaned about this before, but I still find it intensely frustrating that just about no publications in this country take television reviewing seriously. Look at the writers you get for film reviews: everyone from Philip French, Adam Mars-Jones and Derek Malcolm right through to Will Self. The serious papers have proper writers who take the art seriously. Yet the same is just not true for television.
\nToday’s Observer really puts it all into context for me. This was the paper that once had Clive James as their television reviewer. He published his collected criticism in books subsequently. Does anyone honestly think that Kathryn Flett’s thoughts are worthy of anything more than tomorrow night’s fish and chips wrapper?
\nThe TV review page is one page in any newspaper that I always feel that I must read; I suppose because it’s more likely that I’ve seen one of the programmes under discussion than I’ve seen a new film or read a new book. So it annoys me intensely when the limited space available (not all that limited – it’s the better part of a full broadsheet page) is wasted on complete fluff. In Flett’s case, that’s always going to be the new series of Footballers’ Wives (Check<\/a> – last week) and the latest piece of reality fluff (Check<\/a> – top of today’s column).
\nNeedless to say, she loves the latest common denominator to which television has sunk – Playing It Straight – which I was unfortunate enough to see some of Saturday morning. The premise seems to be that a girl is put on a ranch with 10 blokes and she has to pick one. But the catch is that some of them are gay and she has to work out who. Cue lots of campness amongst the men. And this crap is going out for the next umpteen Friday nights on Channel 4 (A station, incidentally, who actually decided to repeat the WHOLE SERIES of The Friday Night Project over the last week having decided allowing an audience to see it not once, but twice already – Friday with Saturday night repeats – was not enough pain).
\nI have some real “issues” with this kind of dross. First and foremost is the idea that the picker should be instantly attracted to any of the men who are chucked in front of her, and more-so, that any of the men should be attracted to her. I suppose she has at least a one in ten chance of finding someone interesting. The blokes don’t – it’s her or nothing.
\nThen there’s the morality of having to identify the only gays in the hacienda. “You’re gay and you’re straight! Do I win a hundred grand?” I suppose the producers think that breaking the stereotypes is a worthwhile thing – heterosexual men can have hair-straighteners too! Maybe next time it’ll be identify the good Catholic girl having to weed out the Jews?
\nAs I mentioned above, the part of the programme I saw was on Saturday morning, and Channel Four managed to broadcast an expletive filled version of the programme (well there was at least one “fuck” in it). From this I’d make two further points:
\n1) Ofcom should pull them up on this. Even though they apologised at the end, it’s very poor from a channel like Channel 4 to let that out at 11.30am on a Saturday.
\nand 2) What the hell is this kind of programming doing, with or without swearing, going out on Saturday mornings? That’s just not suitable programming for that time of day.
\nTo think that this comes from a channel that once brought us GBH, a programme I’m planning to rewatch in the near future. These days, with honourable one-off exceptions, multi-part dramas seem limited to the likes of No Angels and Teachers. Standards have fallen very badly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know that I’ve moaned about this before, but I still find it intensely frustrating that just about no publications in this country take television reviewing seriously. Look at the writers you get for film reviews: everyone from Philip French, Adam Mars-Jones and Derek Malcolm right through to Will Self. The serious papers have proper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}