A ray of hope for television

The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television

Rod Liddle

8 September 2007

Channel Five is leading the way to greater transparency

There is maybe something intrinsic to TV that automatically commands our derision; it plays to our faults, as a species — our narcissism, our impatience, our woefully low attention span. Recently, though, the fugue of discontent has grown a little louder, and particularly within the industry. It is not just the flagrant dishonesty of those rigged phone-in shows, which you know all about — the tawdry money-making scams where the public was gulled right, left and centre. That stuff made one or two people within television sit up suddenly and say, ‘Christ, what am I doing with my life?’

Nor is it simply the BBC, or one of the companies which is franchised to work for the Corporation, stitching Her Majesty up like a kipper to gain a few more thousand viewers by pretending she’d had a strop. That stuff has had its impact, sure. It has, for a start, effected a sort of catharsis within TV executives — but a very ‘TV’ catharsis, rather than the kind of thing which might have been recognised as such by Aristotle. There has been much photogenic hand-wringing and crocodile tears, but in the end I doubt very much that there is the will to change things a great deal. Meanwhile, the bosses of the various TV channels have appeared before us and said hell, what can we do to regain the trust of the audience?

Thing is, they never had the trust in the first place: the public isn’t stupid. Television is known popularly as the ‘idiot box’ for a good reason; the viewing public know it’s a scam and a con, but it performs a function, it fills in those terrible longueurs which might otherwise be occupied by human interaction and that scary thing, conversation.