Thursday 8 July 2010

Going Back in Time and Daytime TV

That's it; I'm obsessed, today I've gone back and created blog entries for 1976, 1981 and 1986. The interesting thing is how much you remember once you start chasing down memories. Often it's the frustration of trying to find something on the inter-web (just see how much info you can find for 1976 for example) that actually stimulates your little grey cells ...as M.Poirot might have put it. I've relived starting university, my first proper job, getting married, buying our first house, working in a pub for a year and so on.

I'm afraid that I've had Daytime TV on in the background and Jesus H Christ it is so banal. I'm sick of hearing about what's happening in "The Soaps" as if they were reality. I can't believe that TV employs people to watch TV so that they can tell the viewers what it is they are going to view in case they are to stupid to follow the plots themselves without these handy spoilers. It's not exactly Rocket Surgery to follow the plots of one or more soaps, is it? I know it's supposed to be arrogant to look down one's nose at "the Peoples Culture" and I know quite how addictive they can be, I got hooked, for a while,  when I was home in the day during some of the 1990's, but for flipps sake this is celebrating and encouraging the dumbing down of society. I'm not a drama snob, if you'd seen what I've read and watched that would be obvious, but I do think that Lord Reith had a point about the purpose of TV and that perhaps we would all benefit if it returned a little way, at least, toward his original vision. If Karl Marx was alive today I think he'd claim that, in the twenty first century, "The Soap" rather than Religion is the opium of the People.

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