TOO OLD FOR PRIMETIME

I know that I’ve reached an age where I’m no longer a member of the main “target demographic” for a lot of the media and am plummeting headlong towards being a member of that ever so different group who are expected to sell our own homes from under ourselves, find adjustable armchairs and stairlifts exciting and generally find ourselves kicked out of primetime and into the relative wilderness of daytime TV and channels so obscure that only an insomniac or someone who had pressed the wrong button on their remote and didn’t know how to sort the problem out might actually watch them, but more and more recently, those little gaps between what we used to call the “programmes” seem to be talking to someone else and, at the same time, finding new ways to irritate the hell out of me.

Lesser Blogfordshire is not the most “media connected” point on the planet, as all of our TV is bounced off a relay tower which somehow manages to lose about 75% of the channel options that large chunks of the rest of the country consider “normal”. This is not a problem and is one that could easily be solved if I chose to solve it by signing up to become another of Murdoch’s masses, but, so far, I have declined. However, whenever we spend any time away from our bolthole of (relative) sanity, we are often exposed to the full horrors of unlimited FreeView and, after briefly watching the metaphorical media car crash of something like “Price Drop TV” we might spend half an hour or so wallowing in the warm glow and relative safety of the kind of TV that we used to love years ago like “Ironside” or perhaps mocking the bizarre insanity of other refugees from primetime like “The Professionals” or editions of “Top Gear” from other years which can be easily dated by the hairstyles of the presenters and not (strangely) by the shapes of the cars.

Has anybody, by the way, attempted a “Top Gear” Edwardian era spoof yet? If they have, I’ll bet it’s on the internet somewhere. I’ll have to have a look… (“With the sleek styling of a banana crate and the power of nearly twenty horses under the bonnet, which provide a kick like Mister Jeremiah Clarkfather’s patented cough linctus and which may just tempt you to let all caution to the wind and run over that fellow clutching the red flag ahead of you  and will no doubt cause many a young lady to blush under their own bonnets and flash a nifty ankle or two…”)

One of the oddest things about these relics from the TV of long ago that are surprisingly to be found alive and well in these obscure parts of what we used to call the “dial” is that someone manages to sell advertising slots during them (“Top Gear” with adverts was a big surprise to me…) and that these adverts are generally for companies, mostly web based ones, that I have never, ever heard of up to that point (and struggle to remember the names of even now).

Meanwhile, back in the big wide world of primetime where those “big boy” channels spend their days grouped in the middle of the schoolyard, smoking fags with their mates and sending the little squirts to play off in the margins, conveniently near to the prickly bushes for some later bullying practice, if they’re not just picking on them already, or flushing their heads down the toilets, things are really not much better. The budgets for the higher profile ads might be more impressive, but the product seems to be woefully banal and unimaginative, and certainly are not speaking to me. Not, I suspect, that they would want to.

I keep on seeing trailers for something called “Street Summer” which, despite having gained a more sinister resonance in recent days, quite frankly, fails to resemble any of the streets I occasionally walk along and might look a little bit scary if I weren’t so down wit da kidz and croosin wit ma posse innit. Yo!

So I’ll be looking forward to that then.

Strangely, whilst I know I’m unlikely to be in that particular target demographic, I doubt that the actual target demographic are either. From what I understand of these things, once that kind of imagery has become mainstream enough to get the attention of those in the media, and influence a wide enough cross-section of “da kidz” that it now includes all of them, including the usual suspects out by the prickly bushes, and if that music is now for sale in petrol stations for sharp suited advertising executives in sleek new BMWs, then “da kidz” who created that particular subculture will already have moved on to start creating the “next thing”.

Sadly the “next thing” might be something like “Cowboys and Aliens” which, unfortunately, only made me realise that the other mysterious suits now working in the movie business can’t even be bothered with coming up with interesting titles any more, preferring this “what it says on the tin” directness which surely must be limited in terms of options eventually, but also might make history look back very unkindly upon this cultural vacuum of an era. Presumably, if this kind of thinking were in place in the 1970s, “Jaws” would have been called “Big Shark!”, “The Godfather” - “Gangsters!” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” - “Flying Saucers!”. God knows what anything vaguely esoteric might have been retitled… Mind you, when it comes to TV, it sometimes seems that the opposite is now true, and the idea seems to be to come up with an interesting or (half) witty sounding title (usually a spin on an older, more familiar show title like, for example, “To the Manor Reborn”which somehow manages to immediately diminish both the new and the old show) and hope that all the pieces come into place and make it work. Of course, all this really does mean is that our current crop of programme makers is standing on the shoulders of broadcasting giants and pissing down on their heads.

Meanwhile Julianna Margulies is the latest – and surprisingly straight-haired - recruit to the L’Oreal stable because she’s “worth it”, despite presumably no longer being deemed “worth it” enough as an actor to get any decent work as she has passed that unwritten benchmark that Hollywood seems to have when actors, especially female actors, get to an age when the work just seems to dry up. Rather unbelievably, it’s getting on for twenty years since “e.r.” began with her character not even being supposed to survive the pilot episode. Instead she was “resurrected” for the series to be transformed into the rather stable and rational calm centre of the chaos and beating heart of the nursing staff on that show. Oddly enough, as the series evolved, little mention was ever made afterwards of her attempted suicide in that pilot which is, of course, where reality and art start to diverge.

Whilst I like to think that any one of us could get the help we need under such dreadful circumstances, I can’t ever imagine that professional colleagues, especially ones in such a high pressure environment, are ever likely to just forget something like that ever happened and let your career follow much the same trajectory that it was headed in before the dramatic “hiccup” of attempted suicide, and would be especially unlikely to happily move you into fields requiring responsibility and involving high levels of stress, and still regard you as a stable and calm rock amongst all of the chaos.

Mind you, the “telly world” of the adverts, dramas and sitcoms was always preferable to the harsher realities of the “real world”. As was once noted, the sun always shines on TV. The clothes are always cleaner… and the rooms are always tidy… and the dishes always sparkle… and “Hutch” can get over his heroin addiction overnight with a little help from “Starsky”…

Nowadays we get quite enough “reality” in reality, thank you very much. No wonder some of we oldies who want to keep our brains intact want to escape to the peripheries and out of primetime to the places where the stories made sense and the words had meaning. Those of us who aren’t just interested in watching our children and grandchildren becoming “famous”, that is…