My wife tells me that my present state reminds her of the famous Thurber cartoon of a woman crouched on top of a wardrobe with the watching man captioned as saying: ‘For ten years I’ve known peace with you, Mildred, and now you say you’re going mad.’ If you substitute the genders, and the fact we have been together more than ten years, my wife is right: I used to be such a benign, adorable character and now, apparently, I have developed into a cantankerous old man who shouts at the television every night. Yes, let me anticipate the inevitable reaction: of course I could switch off, but I feel I have paid my dues in licence fees over the decades and I am now entitled to my madness.
It isn’t just the endless reality shows that have driven me into the abyss â” although I do find participants being routinely humiliated utterly repellent â” it is the way in which all the channels now treat us as morons. I mean, come on, as Joan Rivers says, let’s be serious. For example, to contend that nobody, but nobody, concerned knew that the phone-in contests were devised to produce astronomical profits carries as much conviction as the commandant of Auschwitz saying he had no idea why the gas bills were so high. Should that analogy be taken as offensive by the PC brigade, it is because I believe that everything now happening to us has a political motivation designed to further erode our ability to think for ourselves. In the ratings war the first casualty is always truth. We are being whitewashed and brainwashed, folks.
In my list of television hates I include that survivor from Blackadder who endlessly digs up half of England and discovers nothing more than the broken rim of a Stone Age piss pot, repeats of repeats, celebrity chefs who make snail ice-cream or eat fat-saturated midnight snacks in satin pyjamas, those poor demented women who submit to complete face and body makeovers in a matter of hours and emerge looking like the bride of Dracula, the dandy decorator with the fluffy shirt cuffs who turns ordinary suburban rooms into Victorian brothels, the two fashion gurus who do a lot of rather disturbing breast-squeezing, fatuous TV shows about fatuous TV shows, plus any programme featuring couples with the tragic urge to buy and run a B&B in Transylvania.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in