Bring back Radio?

Television was to be the great leap forward where images would supplement expand and excite way beyond the finite strictures of the leaden words used to capture or convey any ideas. Just has not turned out that way, has it? To keep pace with the moving image and the rate of image renewal possible, without confusing the viewer, the density of ideas possible to convey has dropped dramatically, by factors of tens. Time a news item on TV and time a comparable news item on radio and compare the amount of novel content communicated by the spoken word as against the TV. You could also do the same exercise comparing radio content with one of the more serious topical magazines to see a similar diminution of content from written to spoken. We are good at scanning and taking content out of the written word, less good to hearing at dialogue and retrieving paraphrases out of the content and virtually hopeless at seeing the word for the trees when presented visually.

So a conundrum. One picture can tell a thousand words. Show me a picture of the innards of a gizmo and I can see how it works and relates. A whole page of text describing the same thing might leaving me baffled and confused. Yet a series of images, or equally a sequence of videos, might fail to convey any idea of a process without a verbal story helping me along by explaining the progression. So images can be both powerful (when self-explanatory) or confusing without other mental props to provide the requisite linkage and continuity to guide the evolution of an idea.

Gradually my faith in the BBC providing programmes showing exemplar skills is on the wane. My irritation is mounting each time I see some glad-hander standing in some distant but indeterminate landscape to do their piece to camera. Why? What does this nothing place actually contribute and inform about this spoken piece. Worse can I be bothered to sort out whether they are actually there or just standing infront of a blue-screen with some library picture projected background. Do I care? Why send all these reporters around the country together with all their supporting camera, sound, recordist and make-up crews, putting them up over night and finding their travel costs to achieve what flash of insight? Nil. Now I do love my visuals and I can well imagine that with care and forethought the background can really add depth and enhance the meaning. Trouble is everything is done on the rush, to meet deadlines, to keep within budget, to be there before the rival that no one has any time left to think about what visual story might amplify or even make the spoken words the embroidery.

There is worse to come though. I find myself screaming at the screen every time the hackneyed cliche of shoe and ankle sock hopscotch across the playground. Or visuals so deliberately out of focus as to make them worthless. Are we really so vulnerable and at risk as a society that the faces of our children dare not be shown for fear of attracting the attention of a molester? Are our fears just fantasy that need urgent correction or have we grown to this point when the very next person will attack you or yours? Let us all get it into perspective. The rate of attack probably has not changed much over the century. All that has changed is just that our access to reports of an incident now reach us sooner and from much more distant places. Our actual vulnerability is much as is ever was, if not much improved.

Even worse. No screening of a live event can now be complete without the obligatory pixelated faces. It must have missed me, the injunction that whenever I go out and about I should hold up a pixelated face to all those surveillance cameras that monitor and record my every movements, around town, inside buildings and along our major roads. Records that I have neither consented to, nor have very much knowledge where and when they are being taken and certainly have no say in who gets to review and judge the innocence of otherwise of my actions, meetings and movements. So why? Why pander to these fragile ego's that have to be protected from the camera just because they are a inconsequential moving background? There just might be a tenuous argument which says the identity of a person under arrest might pervert the course of justice. I would argue even on that one. I do not even think that 'undercover' operative that raid an MP's office should been given the screen of anonymity. I want to know who are these idiots that, in our name, go about carrying out instructions that they should have to common sense to baulk at. No, it is just pure laziness and fear of criticism. The technology is now there and it is easier to just use it than to challenge those cheap easy assumptions. What secrets does that person have that demands freedom from identification. With the oncoming product placement within our favourite screenings are we to see restaurants and prized objects pixelated out because they refuse to stump up the going rate? Why does that nurse on duty have to have her identy hidden, what is she hiding? If there are secrets out there, we as a society need to know about it. Just another example that the BBC needs more balls and is now more concerned in keeping its nose clean than pushing the limits and defining standards. What a shame.