Once upon a time, a long time ago, lived a little girl who went on holiday to a country far to the north. Sometimes it was very rainy and she couldn’t play in the forests and fields, so she asked her daddy if she could watch the television set in the corner of the room. She saw that Bonanza was on one day, but Daddy said that she couldn’t watch it as it was on too late. “Why is it on at 11pm?” she asked her Mummy. “that’s because it has manly fisticuffs in most episodes, if not gun fire, and such violence is not for children. You may take your grandfather’s shot gun and shoot all the villagers in an orgy of sickening terribleness”. “Oh” said the little girl, “but I will be far more damaged by watching bearded and socked accordion players wink at me!” “then watch the home-spun slapstick comedy on the other channel” came the reply. The little girl sighed to herself, watched the news for the 4th time that day and read some more Enid Blyton.
Nowadays how things have improved!
1) Only 4 free channels – the restriction in choice is quite, quite restful and given that the other channels, apart from sport, merely run the same type of programmes, I don’t really feel deprived. Graham does, but he shouldn’t watch sport.
2) The clothes of the presenters – The main news readers have become besuited clones of either doily bird seriousness or agéd gravitas, but the others are much more fun, especially the weather people. My current favourite is one of the local news- readers, who is blonde, bearded and has the most comprehensive collection of loud, checked shirts that I have ever been privileged to see. No wonder the Vikings conquered Istanbul.
3) There is 15 minutes of culture news every single day on the main channel, just before the local news and the main news, and a weekly book programme, which isn’t at 11.30pm, and a general cultural show.
4) The media assumes the audience has a brain each rather than one between the lot of them. Example: Questions in quiz on trashy music radio programme, sort of like Capital, ‘who was the previous Finance Minister’ and a question on the rotation of the earth that involved serious maths. There is an hour’s politics show at lunch-time on the equivalent of Radio 1 and a proper science programme on the telly for an hour each week at peak time.
5) They don’t take themselves too seriously (apart from the critics of course). There are coughs and splutters, wrong camera angles and delightfully timed “hummms”. My favourite quiz programme is DooBiDoo, which has a totally fab presenter who presides over singing anarchy quite, quite marvellously and makes the whole thing such a joy.
6) SG-1 is at lunchtime.
7) They don’t censor lyrics. I have learned such a lot about the hip-hop culture that I only knew in theory before. The mad thing is that the sub titles can be a bit mealy mouthed in a rather random fashion.
8) They import programmes from all over the world and sub-title them, rather than dub, so on one day on one channel, there will be a David Attenborough documentary, an Italian film, a Finnish short drama, an American comedy and some sort of Japanese programme (as yet to be determined as I don’t think the sub-titler knows either).
9) The Swedish produced programmes have improved beyond all measure. There are no longer wall-to- wall accordion players, though the comedy does tend to slap-stick. All in all not bad at all.
10) Everyone over the age of 35 complains that there is nothing on the telly. Plus ça change!
Would say something witty about Turkish TV but the day after we bought a decent set we moved into the house where it isn't (for warmth). To date we have only watched the children's channel and adverts for language practice. We only have the free channels - most of what we would actually want to watch is on pay channels.
ReplyDeletehilarious, I don't remember the accordion players -even though now that I think about it.... I specifically have the memory of guitar players (acoustic of course) dressed in embroidered white tunics.
ReplyDelete