Crucifixion's too good for them

I hate to be negative (stop laughing) but isn't the world going to hell in a handbasket? Do you know who I blame?....Well you're right, pretty much everyone on the planet other than myself but if I had to boil it down to one group of people I think I'd lay it at the door of TV executives. Now don't get me wrong I'm not one of those people who kvetch about violence and bad language (unless it's from the young ruffians who hang about at the top of my street) no I like a gory murder and I like to think of myself as one of Scotland's most flamboyant swearers (I'm a positive Oscar Wilde of the invective). My complaint is the sheer lack of imagination and creativity in modern television.

In 1963 Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil" well I'd like to twist that around to give you "The Evil of Banality". Lets take a trip through the televisual day, We'll ignore breakfast TV as banal as it is it's normally only on in the background whilst you make your porridge or if you're lucky have some early morning coitus. Let's, assuming like myself you often have time on your hands, tranport ourselves to the mid morning the land of what I like to call "photocopier TV". These are programmes which are pale copies of what were perfectly adequate filler TV progs such as Changing Rooms and Bargain Hunt. Each channel has produced their even lower budget copies which have in their turn spawned more copies until the morning schedule is filled with Cashinthehomesunderthehammerbeattheburglar60minutemakeover and your head eventually explodes. Ah but I hear you say "why don't you switch off your television set and go and do something less annoying instead" well I say to you SOD OFF! No, what I actually say is; I do. I read, I go out and do my daily tasks and at the moment I'm employed so I manage to avoid the nonsense. However not everyone is so lucky the housebound, the elderly the chronically lazy are forced to literally watch paint dry, or hideous teapots be offloaded at car boot sales. Sure they could always turn to intravenous drug use or taxidermy but why should they. I say give the sad shut ins some decent telly. Let us travel further forward in time to land of childrens TV. I come from the time when there were many British made childrens programmes on TV not to mention many fine imported progs which lasted 68 episodes and often featured infant mortality and/or industrial dystopias. They were great, they forced children out in to the parks to play. Sure many of us were molested but damn it it was character building. Now what is on? The braying ass that is Neil Buchanan on Art Attack a Grange Hill that due to being filmed in Liverpool but set in London has a huge amount of unexplained scousers on it and many many Japanese animations that move so fast that anyone watching over the age of 25 is in danger of bleeding from the eyeballs. ITV has recently announced that they will no longer make any more children's content and in fact want to cut down the hours they show so that they can make more room for extended verions of The Sharon Osbourne show and the like. Yes what a fine idea because of course this will mean children will, instead of wasting their time in front of the boob tube, go to their rooms with an improving book. Finally on our journey we reach the evening, This once was the time when families would gather round the TV and put aside their mutual loathing to sit and enjoy such family fare as The Black and White Minstrel Show and Seaside Special (Tonight featuring Brotherhood of Man) . Ok perhaps not the best examples but my point is that todays multichannel world has fractured the audience and yet not really provided the width of choice it promised. We have channels that supposedly appeal to people's "lifestyle" choices, so we have Men & Motors for men who get tumescent over engine blocks, UKTV Gold for the 6 people who haven't already seen every episode of Only Fools and Horses, the actual "lifestyle" channels where all the drek from morning tv is neatly packaged so you can see the same episodes of Cash in The Attic 3 times a month. Then of course there are channels like Bravo designed primarily to give a vicarious thrill to accountants from Neasden by showing football hooligans and cage fighting competitions. Now obviously many of the channels feature repeats from programmes shown on terrestrial TV mainly BBC but it's not just a way of channels making a quick buck on old programmes now the terrestrial channels are complicit by making programmes with inbuilt points for advertising breaks, if you don't believe me watch a documentary on the BBC and see the unnecessary fades, cutaways, even verbal breaks in narration. Despair not however because......I have a solution.

Every year in August the top executives in British TV meet in my fair city of Edinburgh for the TV festival. Most of them drink their expense accounts dry at the George Hotel. So what we do is organise a mob, not some organised protest I mean a 1930's Frankenstein movie sort of a mob, pitchforks and torches (which I'm sure can be purchased at a reasonable price from B&Q or Homebase). We'll lay seige to them, eventually they will run out of room service sandwiches and bar nuts (obviously they're TV executives so cannibalism is always a possibility - my guess is they'll start with the shopping channel executives) but eventually they will have to come out and face the mob and then we will force them to their knees (not an unusual position for telly people) and make them listen to our demands: Less reality TV, documentaries about important subjects rather than "World's fattest Marmoset". Less formulaic dramas i.e. Holby City, Heartbeat etc and significant investment in proper drama and comedy specifically in terms of discovering new talent. Oh and while we're at it drop the soap volume down to one episode a week (actually I'm not sure the mob would agree on that one) Anyway thats the problem with the world today and that's my solution if anyone can come up with a better one then I'm a Dutchman - Now where did I put my clogs.