An In-depth Moan About Specific Issues with Television Programs

We now live in an age where we have 3D, HD, curved, smart televisions that understand voice and hand commands, and do everything apart from ordering you a takeaway in time to watch your favourite program. Therefore, it could be considered that we're in the golden age of televisual viewing. The quality of picture and sound that the television can emit is exemplary. However, I can't help but feel that the one thing that lets it down, are the actual programs on the television.

It would now be easy for me to then list off the garbage that is actually on the television. Everyone does that; and I've done it many times before. The Real Celebrity Chef Apprentices' Made in Essex Factor, or whatever these faux reality/talent shows are called, come to mind. It would also be easy for me to berate how tediously repetitive, formulaic and idiotic the shows, their content, and their viewers, are. How producers plan 'real' lives to be entertaining viewing. Or how they carefully pick contestants that viewers will hate, that are unfit for purpose, or one's that will bicker to the end of time.

No, that isn't where I was going with this. I mean the actual quality and approach to producing and airing programs.

Let's take Peaky Blinders as my first example. Fantastic series, and please consider this as me riding on the bandwagon of everyone saying so. It is gripping. It is gritty. It has jeopardy. It is has fantastic characters (and a marvellous bunch of actors), who have interesting back stories, and all hold integral roles in how the main story plays out. And it has a brilliant soundtrack of songs that are used to beautifully match the feel of specific scenes, and the series as a whole. Having only seen the second series, I can easily say it is one of the best things that have been on the box over the past five years.

BUT, they mumble so much. Whoever was in charge of recording the voices, did a shocking job. I have the TV volume turned right up, and I still have to really concentrate to understand what they're saying. I would watch with subtitles on if I didn't think it detracted from the series.

This is a problem which I'm finding with a lot of television. I have the TV turned up so I can hear what is being said, and then the adverts start and I have to quickly fumble for the remote so the volume doesn't perforate my eardrums. Why does everyone have to mumble? Can they not just turn the sound up on the actual program? I'm only 22. I feel really sorry for anyone over 80 trying to watch television.

Let's take Coronation Street as my second example, but this is an issue which exists in other programs. Background noise; I bloody hate it. I have a decent set of speakers  plugged into the back of my TV, and they produce good surround sound. So if a character is watching television, whilst having a conversation with someone else, all I can hear is the noise from their TV, and it's highly distracting.

Switch to another house, and they're doing their washing. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but they have insisted on putting a washing machine noise in the background. I'm now sat, ears pricked up, wondering what is making that whirring noise in my flat. I know they're trying to authenticate real life, but that is perhaps one step too far.

If you're lucky enough to be watching a drama with no sound issues, then chances are you can't see what is actually happening. Producers don't understand that a dark drama doesn't literally mean making the picture dark. Peaky Blinders is one example, and most drama series set in the Victorian period or during the war suffer the same. There must be a compromise between authenticating life before the 100 watt bulbs and being able to actually see.

However, Sherlock is a good example of being dark. The first series was terrible. As soon as anything happens at night in Sherlock, I might as well be watching an audio book. It has no excuse either. London is a brightly-lit city. I understand all about using the senses to emulate how emotionally dark the scene might be, but I just wish they would tone it down; well, up, surely…?

And not that I have actually watched it myself, but from the clips I have seen of The Missing on BBC 1 seems to have been shot with an Instagram filter. Everything has that blueish-green tint to it. That isn't how life actually is! Well, not until they invent contact lenses that will give the normal drudgery of life that unappealing hue; if they haven't already.

So, let's assume you've found a program which you can hear and see clearly, free from anything which actually detracts from the episode. Brilliant. Expect the chances are, you already know everything that is to happen, and therefore taking away any possible sense of intrigue or peril. The trailers for programs are far too revealing, and continuity announcers say too much. I understand the desire to draw the potential viewer in, and a way of doing that is by briefly showing the best moments from the upcoming show.

The biggest recent offender, is the Doctor Who series finale. During the first episode of the two-parter, there were lots of very clever and subtle hints towards who the enemy was. 'Ah, I recognise that design… Where have I seen that before?' is what I could have been saying if I hadn't been told the week before.  At the end of the episode, there was the big reveal. That would have been a great moment, full of suspense and intrigue, if only I didn't already know it was the Cybermen. I had worked so hard to avoid all the season spoilers that existed on the Internet, content with my own guesses, to have the BBC ruin it for me instead.

Maybe continuity announcers have to reveal as much as they do, purely so the viewer can get a gist of what they're missing through inadequate sound and picture?

Corrie's 50, But They Want No Fuss...

A little known fact about Coronation Street is that the first episode aired on ITV on the 9th of December 1960, which means that this week was Coronations Streets 50th birthday. However, they kept it very quiet. You would have thought that they would sell merchandise like CD's and DVD's to mark the occasion. You would have thought they ITV would do special shows to commemorate such a historic event; maybe a clip show of the best moments of the past 50 years or maybe even done a show with celebrities in which they answer questions about the show. Maybe they could have done a live show just like Eastenders did for their 25th, or possibly Coronation Street could have shown that very first episode. Also, you would expect the soap to have some huge storyline. Maybe it could be a big dramatic event which would play out over the course of a week, and could result in the death of numerous characters and other storylines reaching their climax. Well, that is exactly what they did do.

The tram crash was the worse kept secret in soap history; apart from every single affair which happens in any soap of course. We knew months ago that would be how Coronation Street celebrated their 50th. Not with a big party, but a huge explosion costing millions of pounds. It was for the most part, well done and all very well written.

ESSENTIALLY; the evening before a wedding everyone is out celebrating, with the stags in a new club under the viaduct and the hens in the old Rovers Return. It turns out there is some kind of gas leak (which no-one noticed...) causing a huge and completely random explosion in the new club destroying it and surrounding buildings. Then, just moments after, a tram goes over the viaduct and crashes off into the corner shops. This tram was made with CGI and had a great shot with the tram driver panicking before it crashed and he somehow survived the event, but I suppose that is because he is in no way important to any storylines. Numerous people are trapped in various places.

The surprise causes a woman to give birth 3 months early and they name the baby Hope. The woman's husband killed a mad woman who was trying to break them up with a hammer moments before the explosion to cover his previous lawbreaking tracks. He then later drags the body near the incident to make it look like part of the accident. She is announced as being brain dead.

A woman is trapped in one of the corner shops with her baby. She is in there as she had just left her husband after telling him that their baby was not his. This woman dies in the shop and the baby survives. However, before she dies she tells the wife of the bloke she had an affair with that the baby is his; meaning that the woman who died had an affair with her husband’s best mate (how original...). There is then confrontation between husband and wife and as far as we know; they have split up.

The club is owned by two people, and they used to married years ago but he left her. She is now engaged to a recovering alcoholic who has a son with a previous wife who he committed bigamy with. However, she starts a lustful affair with her ex just weeks before the marriage but she chooses to stay with her fiancée. The two men end up being together just as the tram crashed and the ex dragged his love rival from the rubble. He is very ill and nearly dead, so he marries his fiancée in hospital before he has a major operation. During the operation, the woman's friend admits that she is in love the woman's new husband and they fall out. We think the man will survive; just.

Another family are intending to move to France soon. The husband is at the stag party and the woman is at home looking after their 2 children and various others. The husband is also in the rubble, but he dies while trying to save someone's life and the house which the wife is in with all the children catches fire. They all eventually escape reasonably unharmed from the house. She finds out her husband has died and gets very understandably upset. She is upset and everyone says how great her husband was while her children sleep in a pub.

In the pub, a couple who cannot have their own child had previously brought her sisters toddler. She then came back and took him because she decides she wants another £5,000 for her son. They cannot afford it, so the wife secretly goes off and steals money from the safe of one of the collapsed corner shops which she will now use to buy the child back.

Other people such as the shop owners in both shops were seriously injured and are eventually saved. They seem to be surviving but soaps can shoot some surprising curve balls, so no-one who is in hospital is actually safe until they walk out the hospital.

Thursday had a live episode, attracting over 14 million viewers, in which the woman gave birth and people died and others cried, and it was brilliant with hardly any mistakes at all. In fact, you would have no idea that it was live apart from the occasional dodgy camera angle.

Did you follow all that? Of course you did, it is the classic drama which you find on every street in England, surely.

Oh what another fine mess they've found themselves in.

I suppose it would be fair to say that I am somewhat of a Corrie addict. I've been watching it for many years; longer than I can even remember. I've grown up with these people. I have my favourite characters, which are now mostly dying out. Everyone can agree that Blanche Hutt was the best and funniest character; a woman who died in real life last year and died in the soap about 9 months. She had some of the best lines ever to come from the soap, and her best scene was voted the best of the past 50 years (video at bottom of this blog). Some of her scenes could easily be from sketch shows.

My other favourite character died last month; Jack Duckworth. He is another great wit from the soap that can also have those moving scenes. When he died, the spirit of his dead wife returned to take him to Heaven in a sad episode. Surely, Vera Duckworth must be the first soap ghost?

In June we had another explosive week in which a serial killer returned from prison to kill more people and blowing the knickers factor up; the same week as the Cumbria shootings, and caused it to be removed from the schedules. I suppose Coronation Street should be lucky that there wasn't a major train crash the weekend before in the real world.

The thing about good writing is that it can make an audience have sympathy for one character and hatred for another. That is some of the power which the writing in Coronation Street has. You felt for Leanne when you saw her break down at being told her husband may not survive his operation; and the same for when Clare got told her husband had died being a hero, and these high emotions being performed on live television in front of 14 million people. It is not an achievement to be ignored.

Look at the concern on this man's face as he nearly crashes a tram into our beloved street...

When Tony Warren created this street over 50 years, he could have had no idea at how successful it would be and how long it would run. However, due to it being 50 years old, original ideas are hard to come by. Even the tram crash is something which has been done before; albeit with a train instead when the show was 7 years old.

Coronation Street has had almost every scandal possible, apart from a banker receiving a huge bonus. We've had bigamy, affairs, drug taking, underage pregnancy, murders, serial killers, transsexuals, alcoholics, drink driving, gay kisses, lesbian kisses, fraud, suicides and not to forget bad car and tram drivers; lots of these happening in just the past year.

The builders of Weatherfield are never bored. In between rebuilding houses and businesses after big disasters, they manage to pass the time away with small repairs and shop refits. It seems normal, boring everyday life, like the ones that us viewers suffer through, just isn't interesting nor gripping enough for us. To shock and grab our attention, they have to blow places up and kill much loved characters. The same goes for the other soaps.

In my street of 10 houses nothing like that happens. A house blew up from a gas leak about 10 years ago with no-one in it. A few of the old people have died or gone into homes. We have a retired gay teacher who lives on the corner and we suspect that our neighbour is having an affair with a very small man. That's about it; and that is actually all true. It may all sound interesting, but it really isn't, and nothing happens in the volume that is seems to occur in Coronation Street. I think the biggest scandal which we have had in the past year is the bins not being collected when it snows and the odd bit of graffiti.

Anyway, in conclusion, even though I may be a touch cynical about anything that happens on the soap; especially this week, this has been the greatest week for some time for the soap and they should be proud of their achievement. Not only did this week prove how fantastic the writing is for the soap, but it also proved how talented the actors and actresses are in the soap, with them all giving a superb performance, especially during the live episode. I look forward to seeing how this is all played out over the next weeks and I hope it creates some more poignant moments where you realise that the actors are actually really good. Who knows what the next 50 years has in store for the soap? Maybe for their 100th celebration they will be attacked by a nuclear missile from some Arabian country which will then intoxicate them with so much radiation, they all grow antlers and rape each other’s wives. Of course, William Roache will still be in it, but he will be like a character from Futurama and his head will be kept on the mantel piece in a container filled with liquid.

We will have to see. When that time comes I will be 68, so I would have just retired. I look forward to it.

P.S. Here is that classic scene with Blanche that I promised you. It is funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e54gzq5Xr0Y

They Cancelled Corrie!

Unless you are a hermit who has absolutely no contact with anyone and your TV, Radio, Computer and Phone all broke this week, you will be aware that in Cumbria on Wednesday 2nd June 2010 a man shot many innocent people in Cumbria, killing 12 people, including his twin brother and injuring many more before turning the gun on himself. It is very sad when things like this happen, but unfortunately these are crimes no-one can predict and therefore cannot be stopped.

This event also coincided with ITV's ‘gripping week of television’, in which crazed mad-mad Tony, escapes from prison to seek revenge. By Tuesday he had taken 2 people hostage and shown them a gun, but the episodes on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday all got postponed because the gun gets used. Yes, how unlucky were ITV. This was going to be the week when they unveiled how brilliant their programs are in High Definition with Britain's Got Talent concluding and an exciting week on Corrie, but because the storyline in Corrie very slightly reflected an awful event that happened in real life, got ruined.

Never fear Coronation Street fans though, instead next week is going to be the ‘gripping week of television’ instead, in which they are somehow going to try and show two weeks’ worth of episodes in the one week. I am going to be fed up of Coronation Street by the end of next week I think. Anyway, this blog is not supposed to be me moaning about Coronation Street not being on this week, it is instead supposed to be a giant moan at the media - yet again.

You can ask ANY leading psychologist and they will tell you this kind of coverage on tragic events like this actually fuels many similar attacks. We live in a society where the media love to sensationalise every piece of news they come across, whether it is the BP oil spill and Barrack Obama having a moan at them or if it is Adrian Chiles leaving the BBC for ITV, they have to make it attention grabbing. News like a mass shooting is matched with dramatic music, big swoosh’s as text runs across the screen and journalists looking sternly down the camera while stood in front of the crime scene with same police tape showing behind them. This makes mass murdering appealing to any possible serial killers.

Every news report about the 'rampage', as they like to call it, starts with a dramatic shot of police officers walking around the crime scene. It looks exciting and thrilling. Then they try sequence the events which happened, in this case they separated the attacks into three different phases. I honestly do not see why they need to do this. What good is coming from the news telling us where he was at certain times and how many people he had shot at each scene? This is only because we now have 24 hour news, meaning they have too much time fill up with useless information.

Then they have to talk to eye witnesses to get a perspective from an inbred idiot of what happened. Of course, we learn nothing we did not already know from these eye-witness accounts because the media has gotten to them first. They have watched the news already, so instead just start repeating what the newsreader had previously said, just with a bit more slurring and less coherent. With any eye-witness account of an event like this, there has to be mobile phone footage of the murderer holding a gun, or indeed driving through country roads. These are shaky and of bad quality, and these, along with the idiot talking with fear in his voice, trigger something in a unstable mind who is watching the news as if it were a religion, and beginning to froth at the mouth at the thought of the blood.

Then in an attempt to make everyone become full of empathy and sadness, they name and show pictures of the victims looking happy. This is done with such dignity which should be applauded as they are announced as bland as possible. However, they read the names out slowly, and it makes the name become slightly imprinted on the listener’s memory, and with each name you can hear the beat of gun. However, in the unstable mind of the one or two viewers, this begins to sound like a triumph, and each name being read out slowly sounds like a triumph.

Also, the media are strangely keen to uncover the reasoning for this outburst of bullets in the direction of unsuspecting and innocent people. Rarely have I read or listened to any report on the subject of these killings without the question of 'Why?' being shouted like a vicar giving an emotional sermon in church about the devil and his sins. 'Why did the 52-year-old taxi driver shoot 12 people dead in Cumbria before shooting himself on Wednesday?' 'What were the triggers for Derrick Bird's murderous outburst?' Time after time these questions are being shouted at us, while the media slowly uncover facts like him being probed over tax issues. Continuously, there is this question of 'Why?' and again, in some mind in the country this is all triggering something which could end in more attacks.

I do not want to sound as if I am trying to preach to you blog readers that the media are the cause of these kinds of attacks, because they are not. Certainly, they are not helping the issue, but it is to do with the individual who has some kind of mental problem. I can offer you numerous case studies of this being the case. We all remember the shootings in a German High School, where a teenage shot his own peers and teachers, before turning the gun on himself a few years ago. This was covered in pretty much the same way by our media as these Cumbria shootings are.

The attack at the German High School came soon after all those High School shootings in America, which seemed to happen quite a few times at different school in a small amount of time. Their media, yet again, covered each story in pretty much the same attitude as our media did then and now - in fact, probably worse. We all know how emotional American's can get about this kind of thing and they have a history of sensationalising every negative event in their country and with religion always being the key. These are prime examples of the media trying to cover a big news story for the public, but sensationalising it make it sound like an extraordinary and history making event.

Obviously, the media should cover these stories as the public do have a right to know about these events. Sure, the media should be sure to constantly emphasis how terrible and life changing this event is. I just think they need to cover these kinds of stories with a bit more care, and shouldn't fill an entire half hour news show on this one event. I personally think dramatising and sensationalising everything is just going to make events like this a more common occurrence, and do we want a world with spontaneous killings like in Grand Theft Auto?

These kinds of killings are almost impossible to predict and in reality, are rather uncommon in the UK. The fact that this killing spree was not planned and was purely spontaneous after something triggered in his mind to do such an awful thing. Now the new ConDem Government want to enforce tougher rules against guns. I can't see this helping in the slightest bit. The more you restrict people from having guns; chances are the amount of gun crimes will increase. Restricting what kind of guns everyone is allowed to own just because one man lost the plot and killed a few people, is not necessary. Maybe the police should just be more prepared for attacks of this nature. We've already heard on the news how it took police three hours to find him - and by then he had shot himself. That is what needs changing - not the rules against guns.

I also think that cancelling Coronation Street was a step too far as well. This is a prime example of ITV trying to be as politically correct as possible and trying not to offend anyone, because they know we live in a very PC Country and people are easily offended. Sure, in the episodes which have been moved to next week will include a gun and two people being killed, but this is in a soap where everything that happens is almost completely taken away from the real world. I really do think it is a shame that we live in a PC World (shut up, I do not mean the computer shop, I do mean 'a Politically Correct World) where we must tip toe around every subject in society, just in case we make some person cry. I blame the media and the 27,000 people who phoned up to complain about the Ross/Brand fiasco nearly 2 years ago. I hope they are happy with what they have done to our lives.

Everyone's first reactions to this story are of being distraught and completely upset by it. Mine? It didn't affect me at all; in fact I am not even sure I cared in the slightest bit. You see, I had been drinking; two bottles of Champagne at a friend’s house, and the news was announced to a drunken me by some woman on the CBBC channel reading the news. Whether it didn't affect me because I was drunk or because CBBC carefully white-washed over how awful this event was, I will never know.

Anyway, that brings an end to my rant about the media. Hopefully, I am completely wrong about it all and there will be no repeat killings this time. Also, just because I can and it makes me sound brilliantly kind, my respects go to those families who were affected by the loss of someone special at the hands of Derrick Bird, even though I know none of you will ever read this...