I enjoy most of what Guardian TV critic Charlie Brooker writes, mainly because he’s able, with the ease of a fish in water, to make a complete mockery of the banal and empty-headed nonsense frequently thrust on the general public by ratings-hungry, money-grabbing television executives under the rubric of “entertainment”. He is also very witty. Very witty indeed. The article below is worth reading, though, for anyone who lives in Britain and owns a television, because I think, underneath the jokiness, Brooker’s actually made quite a serious point about our cultural impoverishment, as exemplified in prime-time TV shows like the X Factor:
(Sadly I cannot say that I don’t watch the X Factor – I often do, though not every week. Indeed, I sometimes even enjoy it. But if I enjoy it, I enjoy it like one enjoys picking one’s nose and eating it, or scratching oneself and having a sniff – you know, in a kind of debased way. Usually after “enjoying” the X Factor, I want to go and sit in a cellar and drink cheap wine for fifty years until my liver gives out and I slowly, painfully slip into death. It is the kind of vicarious, voyeuristic enjoyment that makes actual lived life seem pointless and empty; that rather than filling life up, kills it, and leads one to live as if already dead. Well, I suppose that’s an exaggeration, but only just).
we don’t get TV reception so it is all videos at our place — I hate commercial TV. So easy to dumb down.