Redacted

The BBC has lost sight of why TV was created and became so popular. The visual image adds so much more depth to the story that is told. A moving image enhances and expands that depth allowing the viewer to interpolate the sequences with all their own life experiences. What more so than the news stories, pressing home all the varied extremes of human life. Nowadays, more and more often, in the news we are offered a background and pair of shoes! Even worse the frames are deliberately set out of focus so nothing can be seen, just vague impression of, of nothing really. Just the denial of visual media. What is the worst of all are scenes where selected faces are pixelated to ensure that that person cannot be identified. This is all so wrong. If a story is important enough to be told tell it straight.

The news scenes we are shown are recorded in the public domain, out in the open. All observers at that location can readily see what we are prevented from seeing. Why? What are we so afraid of as a Society that we must hide our children away? For fear of what? What tangible dreadful act can be unleashed by showing the faces of our children? Is the location really going to be descended on by hordes of what, to do what, abuse them, vilified them, sneer at them for their social position, ridicule their fashion? No. If adults are out an about behaving in totally inappropriate manners, why should they be protected and obscured out of focus? If you are in public, no matter what the provocation or excuse, you have to conduct yourself with restraint. Incase Society will judge you. If you are empowered by the state to carry out official functions, policemen, prison guard, nurse, border controls, bailiffs, what ever role, why should you need or require to have your identity pixelated out? You are lawfully doing your work within the limits placed on you and carried out with integrity.

In this ever increasing rush to Totalitarianism just pause. Think back to East Germany and the Stasi reign of terror over the cowered a population, ever afraid of who was overhearing or reporting back on your every action. This rush to ever more define, regulate and consequentially reprimand for non-compliance all aspect of human activity obscures the core principle of all societies. What binds us together, are not laws, not GCHQ snoopers, not law enforcers, you cannot coerce citizens into becoming better citizens. What binds society together is our need for acceptance and the fear of disapproval from our social peers within our community. Not what the top dog of the day declares, just the nod of agreement from that neighbour. So faces do matter. They, not shoes, not body movement, not locations, faces are what we scan for clues to belonging, for hanging some sort of relationship onto. Do we know these children or can we relate to them? Are those misbehaving adults part of our group, if so can we express our disapproval? If not can we draw clues as to who in our network may too be inclined to stray. Faces are key. Even more so for officials going about their lawful business. Yes we do need to see them and to be able to recognise them. Yes we do need to be able mix their off-duty life with their official activities. To pass appreciation or reprimand on how they choose to discharge their duties. We should all be in fear of anonymous officials who do not need to account for their actions, are free to officiate without any constraints. When a policeman can choose to refuse to comment or worse lie about actions clearly taken yet still have their superiors support we are in deep trouble. If the face is known, their social peers will make it perfectly clear what behaviour is unacceptable. Quick, salient, efficient and so effective far beyond what rule books, tribunals, inquests, enquiries, reports, all the paraphernalia of top down control can possibly achieve.

Redaction in modern speak is the blackout of evidence which is deemed a risk, legal or security. Just a highfalutin word used to obscure a very nasty truth. Someone with a secret wants to hide what is actually going on because they fear adverse reactions. They wish to set themselves aside from the society they are part of so their society is not able to judge them. Frightening. Openness and having to account to your immediate social peers is the only thing that keeps us on the right track. Everytime you encounter someone deliberately concealing their identity shout out aloud, for all to hear, imposter!

Smoking Mirrors

The Media reflects but also modifies the society it mirrors. The Media can only survive and prosper if it hits the funny bone every time. So it always has concentrated on permutations of the gory, the tragic, the spectacular, the shameful, the lusting and the voyeuristic. It is just that nowadays the media has so refined its targets, honed in on our subconscious trigger, it can hit the G-spot of sensitivity each and every time. This is distorting our perception of what we are, how we respond and is leading us to adopt new attitudes that are not reflective us as people or a society. The media distortion of us and our view of our reflections is channelling our future reactions, the role model we hold and use to navigate life by.

When our favourite soap 'deals' with a difficult issue, what ever it is this time round, child abuse, family rape, racial hatred, partner beating, gang banging, let us just stop and pause for thought. They are not 'dealing with it' they are cashing in on horrendous social issues, using those issues to pull in viewers and push up their ratings. We must learn to rush to our social networks, by twitter or facebook or what ever and challenge all those simplistic, one dimensional characters and situations and scream out loud, this is not true. Life is much more complicated and convoluted. Life is not simple black and white with  a single start and stop point. Protest out load that their representation is selling us and all victims, so so short. The emotional nightmare of love in jeopardy, distrust and hate cannot be conveyed by one line put downs.There is no one person walking off into the sunset or taken off to jail, or some such simple resolution. Everyone that comes into contact with the events is tainted and carry the corruption onwards about their person for years into the future and on into all their furture relationships. Get that across and then you are 'dealing with it' and doing us all a service by sharing the visceral agonies of life when it goes off the rails.


The next time we surrender to a fantasy world, to escape the gritty realities, let us hang on to some semblance of logic, connection, plausibility, some portrayal of life as all of us do experience it. As we lose ourselves in impossible relationships, gut wrenching bodies torn asunder and mechanical Armageddon, just pause and reflect you are a member of the human race that has to negioate, deal and some how live in a kind of harmony with all other humans. This is not the way life is. Again use your networks and protest out loud at all improbable, implausible plots characters and situations. Beyond your experience sure but not beyond any imagaineable reality. Escape yes but keep some semblance of realism. Keep it possible to translate back to a life we actually have to live. Ridicule plots that jump from one imponderable to another and another without any rythme or reason ever offered. Suspense, oh yes but not adondonment of all logic.

Time for us shape the media we use to reflect the society we aspire to be. Do not accept being pandered to, do not accept pap, stand up and demand to be treated as an adult going about in a adult world. Challenge all that offer anything other, use your voice.

Hysteria

How many accusation's does it take to prove guilt, ten, or hundreds or thousands? Point is an accusation is just that, an accusation. Sure a hundred tend to indicate that something was not right and thousands mean that there is certainly something wrong that has taken place. So the media storm surrounding the Jimmy Saville exposure sounds as if all the accusations have been proven. He is guilty as charged, a pervert, a child abuser. It is unfortunate that he is not now with us to defend his name. 

To date the accusations are just that and have yet to be examined as to their reasonableness. Before jumping in on the witch-hunt let us all just pause for a moment. Accusations come in all shades from the spurious, to the 'me to', to retrospective remorse, to the full on corroborated, clear, without a shade of doubt. Before vilifying a reputations of many decades standing it is worth pausing to check how the accusations stand up by applying all the usual standards we use when considering any serious accusation. Is there corroboration, is there a sequence and patten, what degree of abuse from the inappropriate, to the over familiar to the outright violation, was it consensual (at the time) and how plausible are the claims in all the circumstances?

What I think of the man, Jimmy Saville, does not come into it but neither do I hold a candle for Saint Jimmy. I certainly do not want to minimise the distress and years of guilt that lay behind these accusations. What we do all need and want is the full extent of the truth to come out, as best it can, after all these years. Was Saville a solo operator or did he work within a circle of similar predators? Did his fame endorse an over-familiar attitude to the young people his work put him into close contact with? Were (and are) the codes of conduct for 'famous' TV personalities robust enough to deal with the mania of groupies throwing themselves at or worse making themselves available to their target idol? How can a solo operator, or a small close knit group, operate with immunity for such a long period in such a large organisation that I suspect is riddled with gossip and innuendo.  Who else knew and were complicit in his exploitation over so many years?

There is a lot more behind this story than just the vilification of a once idol to millions. Let us avoid the trap of using hindsight judgements of our sophisticated age with regard to minors, sexuality and abuse and not use them in place of the mores of twenty, thirty or even forty years ago. Be sure, place guilt where it is found, but first let us be a little circumspect with all these accusations until we better understand their strength and where they lead us.

Wanted - role model

Within my life time the family has gone from conservative and insular to global and transient. Not mine, but families around me were centred on the close family units of the parents, the Aunts and Uncles and the Grandparents. This closed circle set the norm for what you could or could not do, what interests were possible and how you expressed yourself. They provide the reference point and were quick to correct any deviation. From within their safe haven and encircled by their safety shield the children grew and were invited to discover, explore and gain experience in the surrounding world of shops, church, amusements, sports and the evening out and the occasional film. They set the norms of dress and speech and expected conformity. They set the bar and were the only role model to follow. The radio, the newspaper and magazines or the annual trip might give insights into other possible lifestyle. But just brief glimpses, nothing substantive to base a breakaway lifestyle on. Even your school fellows were social clones. You were the product of your immediate society. 

Then came television, breaking apart the insular family time together, introducing appreciable insights in to the how others live, offering tangible alternatives. Television plus of course social mobility. The freedom to roam and spread, dispersing the family core, breaking forever the close bonds that tied families together. Lots of other social factors were also playing, but mobility and television were the key factors that finally broke the former almost total reliance on the family unit, to get by.

Nowadays the core family unit, of parent and children, cannot compete against the rival attractions of  television, personal computer, online social media, live streaming of news or entertainment, virtual avatars. The family unit is dysfunctional, it can no longer sit together at best spending quality time relaxing in each others company at worst just updating each other on events. Even the core unit of parents is challenged with a single parent, with possibly serial partners, becoming the norm. So what role models do our children of today encounter that will give substance to their perception of who they are and the society they inhabit?  Not the schools with their imposed roles to mentor our new citizens and assume quasi-parental duties. The contacts are too fleeting, too transient, too impersonal to really count. We are just left with the the fictions they are now surrounded by, of cardboard caricature soap stars, media celebrity fantasy lives or even worse some ephemeral virtual being lacking any substance beyond a spotty teenagers imagination. 


In this global connected world the old role models are totally irrelevant. Right? Wrong, when even the language we speak modifies our thinking and logic structures what chance have we of assimilating other cultures. I defy any English born native speaking person dropped into the middle of say China, or India, or South America, to feel at ease and be able to comprehend the reactions and intentions of the people now surrounding them, let alone elicit favourable reactions to their aspirations. No, we are of our society. As I explored in Know Yourself, who we are as individual depends on the society we are born into. We have to have relevant role models to inflate and guide our sense of being, as that person within that society. Without it lies insecurity, anxiety, misplacement, that feeling of never belonging never being understood. We have to rethink our societies evolution. As a start we have to restructure the family unit as I explored in A baby is for life.

BBC is on the Game

More and more of the BBC's 'light entertainment' output seems to be about indiscriminate product pushing. A media self-attractor appears, uses the format, whatever it is, to ruthlessly plug their book, CD, series, show, tour. The host for the format appears submissive and resigned to just being an escort from one plugger to the next plugger, waiting in the wings. Each plugger in turns taking every opportunity to thrust their product at the camera. At least the shopping channels are up front and open about it, they are just there to sell product. The BBC comes, or rather came, with loftier ideals. 

The BBC and its audience is in a deep relationship of free give and take, based on trust and goodwill. The BBC offers itself for free and the public accept that free offering  with the assumption it is untainted. Clearly a commercial programme maker is dependant on generating revenue and that need impinges on what and how it goes about making it programme offerings. Clear and understood by them and their audience. 

Its charter requires the BBC to appeal across the broad spectrum, inevitably its business is feeding the voracious appetite for 'celebrity' titbits and light entertainment new arrivals. They have to be in and on the media circus where the trade is "I make myself available to appear with you, in return I get to talk about my product". They, the BBC is inescapably in the selling game, of tease and seduction, a role that is as close as it gets to prostitution. Where the waters get muddled and muddied is the degree of how free and easy are you? Is the BBC there as a common-garden whore, harlot, hooker, strumpet or rather as some refined courtesan? 

The distinction that separates a slut from a courtesan is fine but hugely significant. The difference at the lowest point where anything goes as long as you want it and long as you pay for it, to the other highest discreet end, where an accommodation of desires is reached without overt commercialisation and all veiled in good manners and refined conduct.  Where prior selection, distinction or approval are the order of the day not the going rate.

One consequence of being on the game, at whatever level, is that it brings with it the attention of the pimps. Those that want control and influence on the money generated, the how's of the 'service's' provision and restricting who does or does not get access and to which aspect of the 'service'.  The courtesan, to retain self-respect and that right of prior approval and selection, has to negotiate a way past these leeches who seize every opportunity to coerce the abandonment of these lofty ideals.


In the beginning when everything was all corporately funded and sourced it was more like a marriage of mutual convenience. Then the BBC, no longer the sole provider, was seen along side and judged in comparison to the  'successful commercial' providers, brazenly displaying attractive wares each carrying clear price tags. To keep, up with the 'commercial successes', the BBC has whittled away its corporate distinction, in the process losing the sense of what set them apart. It has reached a point now when the question has to be asked, do they still set their own agenda or have they become a mere vessel open for exploitation by the commercial world?

It is no longer clear with any BBC programme whether it is freely sourced,  unbiased and presented purely from some artistic, cultural or educational endeavour. Or is it, as is now so often the case, linked or even tied to some other objective manipulated by others outside of the corporate BBC. We the viewers can no longer rely on the impartiality of the BBC. That trust has gone.  Every programme offering has to be assessed, is it given freely without qualification, is it a disguised free offer of inducement or is it just a blatant bribe? Lets be clear here. The BBC has opened itself up to commercial exploitation and joined the world of prostitution. It offerings can range from the benign, its own commissioned  programmes from independent producers, to buying an outsourced complete programme, to bidding in auction wars with rivals all the way through to accepting programmes just as vehicles to sell product. Where now is our courtesan?

Animated Stupidity

Just an aside really, there was this item which drew attention to how UK animation studios where working under a severe disadvantage, compared to EU colleagues, as they receive no Government support. Here was a leading edge industry, with a worldwide repute, pushing forward vigorously the frontiers of IT exploitation, capable of growing careers for a wide range of skills from the creative edge all the way across to tradesmen. What is not to support? Well of course the chorus of me-to's when you are struggling to know where to lop yet another branch off a bloated overgrown unsustainable tree.

Then the incredible stupid short-sightedness struck me. Animation is used by a wide variety of sectors but one sector in particular, has a singularly large and voracious appetite for animation. Children's TV. Young impressionable minds, in this new ever on live-stream feed age, being fed material largely from another culture, the USofA. Material that permeates the language, roles models, ethics, racial, cultural, rich v poor every issue that weaves the fabric of the society that you are and what feel you belong to. This market then is the market our government see no role in supporting! Let market forces be the sole determiner of what TV diet our children are fed! Mind-numbing stupidity of the crassest order.

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!

Stolen

It has been a long time since I was so bored by a well-intended programme. The do-goody and moral indignation screamed at you at every so laboured and clumsy turn. The clichéd contrasts with social good life were banal and thin of any substance as to be an irritant. No wonder the scarcely one-dimensional characters struggled to fill their allotted space. No dialogue worth mentioning, no character to offer and a plot that struggled to make sense to all involved, other than the author. Credit where it is due, he surely, at some time must have believed in his story. Even the staged car crash, no not the programme but an actual scene, was so staged and hammed up that no one, crew, actors, extras least of all the audience believed, or cared. Thanks goodness for the mobile, that get me out of here plot changer, so heavily used, was there a scene change that did not rely on it? Such worthy actors, such a worthy cause and so wasted opportunity. Filmed in a city I know not where, even the guessing game of where on earth, England or a Eastern European cheapo location failed to keep my arm twitching as I checked my watch so frequently, yes, really yes the minutes dragged by. Hope against hope that finally something would be said that mattered. There you have it. A dismal failure of drama. Nothing of content to even launch a documentary and not even enough to puff up a docudrama. Just a miserable failure. But we do care, we want to understand the issues behind child trafficking. We want to know why the 'police', the agencies involved, are all so helpless, we want to know how the traffickers can get rich yet be beyond the law. There is a programme there, waiting to be made. But it certainly was not Stolen.

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.

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.

Programme ratings

The most unlikely programmes get these surprisingly huge audiences, 7M at the last count. Everyone congratulates the programme for its cutting edge, insightful, raw drama, searing dialogue, what-ever content with the usual awards to follow.

Almost nothing to do about the quality of the actual programme. It is all to do about scheduling and the lack of any quality alternative. Despite the talk of the youth migrating to view on demand TV, the majority still settle down to watch scheduled TV. You only have to look at the keenly contested 8:00 and 9:00pm slots to see this. The problem and the irony is that with the ever increasing channels to choose from there is the stark lack of choice. American serials, the non-ending repeats of repeats and continually recycling old films. More often than you would care for there is little choice on offer at the key viewing times. Cheap to make reality show exploiting human vulnerabilities, game or makeover shows predicated on the same weakness and just occasionally a documentary that does not endlessly trail the content with a recap of the content incase you missed the laboured elementary point that was about to be made, except of course, first we must be shown what is coming up.

That may be the only diet our cousins across the atlantic can cope with but we Europeans are made of sterner stuff. We can take sharp, fast, insightful documentaries, just as we can absorb dramas with a credible plot that is sustained across all episodes and characters that grow and develop and can actually mouth dialogue that bears some resemblance to every day speech. With the everyday pap american skewed programme offerings is it any wonder when anything, anything that treats its audience as adults and gives them something tangible to watch and think about gets disproportionate viewing figures. Even if its apparent depths are superficial rather than sustainable, it is still better than alternate offerings. So a silent protest by the masses ever searching to find content that is not mind numbing infantile in concept.

Long gone are the expectations of routinely offerings of programmes of quality. But what a real treats when that occasional titbit does surfaces attracting veiwers well beyond its actually hitting power.

Chicken or Egg?

Take what media you like, newspaper, magazine, TV or, we should now add in, YouTube and they all make the same defensive claim, they only serve what their consumers want. If the consumer did not repeat view their product they would not be in business. They simply just reflect the public taste at large as exercised by their consumers. Cant argue with that.

The consumer of course can only choose from the range of diets presented as an all-in package and has to accept all the sleaze and distasteful alongside with those items that more closely aligned with their own taste. If only life was black and white, then consumer choice alone would be able to shift the media diet to the wider more desirable topics. But it is not black and white. The various forms of media are all mega industries with huge investments to recoup so have invested heavily into the triggers of impulse interest that push their format to the fore. They have to connect with the buying public to stay alive and are certainly more savvy than the consumer as to what ticks theirs boxes. It is not a level playing field in many regards.

We the consumer have our vulnerabilities. We do seem attracted to the saucy, the salacious, the risqué, the hint of scandal, the banana slip as well as the more worthy heroics, compassionate or daring-do. These almost subconscious predilections are exploited to the full. Backed up no doubt with serial focus groups to dissect and redefine the expected targeted response to each new item so to better sharpen the attack the next time round. So collective weaknesses are examined and exploited but we collectively do not think or wonder about those same weaknesses so exploited. So what if the bumps and grinds, the show and tells of every day life have a disproportionate exposure and collective awareness than they really deserve?

Gone are the mutual musings and levelling of the village pub or extended family gatherings. It is the soap storyline and morality, the simplified banner headline, the isolated gratuitous image clip that now forms and shapes our collective id, that consensual value of what is our idea of the norm or acceptable. The media is the main if not the only tool shaping how we see life, our expectations of what might happen and our setting the bar for our hopes for future achievement. Insidiously, life choices are preselected, simplified and promoted with the range of content within the media outlet consumed. Not a one off single shot but a grapeshot broadside scattered wide, diffused from the advert content, editorial direction all the way through to the sappy snappy prime attention grabber focus.

The winning morality and life style thus promoted is simplistic, confrontational divisive, you are either with us or against simplicity. Anything else leads to dialogue, doubt and debate and these self-evidently are not attention grabbers. To promote themselves the media simplify real life down to easily digestible sound bites with quick easy direct emotional or sentimental appeal. There simply is no scope for complexities or alternate possibilities that real life is seeped in. Thus the media have taken over and now control the direction of social development. There is no alternative dialogue, they hold the keys to all the channels of expression.

These keys that determine our societies future direction are held by one man with regard to newspapers, or just a few individuals on governing boards with regard to TV, films or magazines. Each is referential, looking to the other for signs of a new approach or direction to copy that might quicken interest. It is not just that all of our morality and political agendas are being set by just a small group of not necessarily representative individuals, as if that was in itself acceptable. But they are setting the very tenure of our society. Our very democratic political systems has coalesced so as to be better presented and advantaged by the way the media chooses to present it. What? Adversarial sells better than complimentary but nuances of differences. The more extreme they can position the parties the easier they are to differentiate and label as good or evil. This in the long term serves our political system badly. The coalition is uncomfortable in the hands of the media so they look and promote dissent. Equally they could promote successful collaboration but that would not sell copy.

Every government announcement has to be in terms of right or wrong there is no middle ground of maybes and it depends. Ministers are either liars or the good guys without a flaw. A decision is right or else it is a gigantic cockup. Watch out if a Prime Minster was to say, "I have not yet decided which way to go"! But this not the reality of the political processes, it is full of uncertainty, full of balancing conflicting interest, full of lack of precise information and clear judgements. That is why we have politics, personal moral judgement at its finest. Except of course the media cannot sell complexity so we have adversarial politics. Contrary to the real issues, whenever a major policy comes to public notice it has to be couched in for or against terms. In the past when you may have had twenty conflicting opinions written up in the same newspaper even, you the reader were exposed to a width and range of views and you could sense out the issues that seemed right to you. Not now. With just a few hands controlling the output direction there is now just one focused opinion represented in a range of ways. No choice.

What we need desperately as a society is information about the facts, the conflicts and the choices and then wide ranging debate. Only then we as a society will grow up and begin to come to terms with all the complexities our modern society challenges us with. Chicken or egg. Ultimately we each choose which media we take up. We all need to make more careful choices and to be more articulate about what we do not like. We can actually change the shape and nature of our society. If we choose. It is up to us. Each and everyone of us.