Weekly Sanity Check

Just as I despair of the all the attention seeking, the shallow me only selfishness and the endless mindless prattle that fill every day along comes Alison Graham's weekly column in the Radio Times. A breath of sanity. A welcome no nonsense, face life as it is and get on with it attitude. She, like we all, has her lapses when she get overcome with girlyness. Fair do's and she does forewarn with an unmissable klaxon before she gives into her temptation. Her doing girly is of course gritty, blunt and scalpel sharp to the point. Gets over it and gets back to her plain, but so nicely couched self. So often she mirrors, or rather she hones in with clarity on thoughts that were rambling around in me. Or perhaps more honestly, she plucks out of all the chatter a key essence of social conduct that I wish I had had the sense to see, before her enlightenment. And consistent, week after week. No overblown ego, no inflated sense of importance, just another generous insightful observation sparked off by some TV media event.

Her day job, the one that pays the bread, those previews of all the up-n-coming schedule programmes she is paid to write are equally pithy and to the point. A degree of dissemblance is entirely forgiveable. She is employed after all to promote programmes appearing in the schedules and though she seems to have a range of freedom, it is clear she cannot just say, it is all rubbish this week but has to find something. Over time it has become very clear those days when she is of a mind it is all unworthy rubbish, then picks out some long standing formulaic series or some oft repeated golden classic to make her choice for the day. Her linguistic somersaults and verbal gymnastics become words of wonder, as she trips lightly through many varied degrees of faint praise to satisfy the only upbeat requirements of her paymasters. Not that that stops her, occasionally firing both barrels from the hip, finding up-beat words to scathingly expose the nature of rubbish that she has been paid to praise.

A very loud thank you, Alison Graham. Each week you restore my faith as I brace myself for another week's bombardment of trivia. Thank you pay-masters, for carrying on having the courage to give her her head.

Oh yes as a ps, whatever she says is liberally drizzled with high octane irony, delicious!

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.