Empty Words

We are surrounded by a babble. A babble of empty words that make a lot of sound, that seem to be saying something really rather important but actually deliver next to nothing. I read with mild interest or mostly amusement the Radio Times and their reviews of that days outpourings. Now when they get to 'review' the interminable formulaic CIS TV show or some clone copy or endless repeats as one of their choices of the day you just know they are scratching around to fill space. It really struck home the other day. It was a particularly poor day for TV, the listings were poor. The reviewers were reduced to re-paraphrasing the brief come-on descriptions of the actual listings. When they end up summarising Graham Norton's TV personality as a way of finding something to say, you can see the bottom of the barrel has been scrapped clean, just the grain showing.

What we are witnessing are words to fill a prescribed space irrespective of content. How honest it would be to just leave a blank space. That is why of course I gave up reading newspapers many years back along. Not that I am not interested in world events just the newspapers were sadly letting me down. Just taking the Sundays, leaving the dailies and weekend version aside. What is it four, or is it now six sections, of weekly outpourings on not too dissimilar weight of paper and print. Not written by a novel band of contributors for each week but the same journalists week after week spreading their word content across the sections. Given, a rather extraordinary and exceptional given, that these contributors are highly articulate, very well read across a immensely wide range of topics and are a conduit for well reasoned incisive thought, given that, how many of the weeks of the year could they practically managed to put together a cogent article? Clearly no one person can be assembling, week after week, the requisite number of words to convey deep insightful views. They must resort to prattling, sounding right, saying self-evident things that might be perceived as relevant but actually camouflaging the paucity of real ideas. So we have generous amounts of speculation, anticipation, knee jerk reactions and the tried and tested mob appeal quotient. Strip all that away and there is paucity of factual matter, a lack of meaningful context and almost certainly, no worth its weight in salt, measured judgements of where now or where from.

The pages have to be filled, week after week, with something. Anything rather than a blank page even though that would be more honest and would not be so contemptuous of their readers intellect. But it is not just the printed page. The same applies to the current affair programmes and to all those documentaries. Bigged up large but with small menus on offer. Just have to spread out thin to justify the allocated schedule time or maybe to justify the celebes extortionate fee. So much prattling about nothing. Sure we cannot be serious all the time, and speculation, gossip, tittle-tattle in small doses lightens the mood and might even rejuvenate the probing critical mind. But lets keep the main content purposeful with words given respect to expand and explore ideas, that broach new horizons and take us as a people to places where our fertiles minds have not been before. There is so much out there to get our minds around. Prattle might be an oil but it is not a mechanism to discover.

Having written myself out of the plot I leave you with........








Space to think.