Is Modern TV Truly Awful;or:Was it as good in the old days as we would like to think?

I have a confession to make; I am utterly out of place as a decided non-millennial as the quintessential grumpy old man, not necessarily baffled by technology or decrying laptops or mobile phones, using them like the next man yet dispirited by their essential dehumanising soullessness. I concede I quite like Facebook, but Twitter and Instagram are out of bounds, the former a mere excuse for banal, pointless banter or (more disturbingly) vicious abuse, where many public figures, celebs, politicians et al who pre-internet were mostly insulted behind their backs or out of range, now have to put up with the most appalling, vituperative, ugly comments that now veer into genuine threats of harm to the individual, as sinister or threatening phone calls for example (of which I suffered periodically) appear an anachronism, as greater cans of worms are now open and available to people who think as such. My late father was a photography enthusiast for decades in a period when it was quite rare for someone like himself to have sophisticated camera equipment, as innumerable friends and acquaintances often harangued him to take portraits of their family or cover special events. He was unable towards the end of his life to keep up with digital technology, although the sands of time were sadly catching up with him by this stage. He did not live long enough to witness Instagram, which is no bad thing as it overwhelmingly proves several stark issues, one of them being it is an excuse for vacuous young wannabees to show of their shapely bodies, but not their intellectual prowess, as proved by the monotonous drivel accompanying such portraits and selfies in the comments section ("GR8" "LUV U BABES!") by various panting admirers, and the plain fact that, as I and my Dad always knew, 99.9% of the world's population are absolutely awful photographers and should not be let anywhere near any kind of camera, still or video.

And here's a more startling confession: I handed in my TV licence to the operating centre in Bristol five years ago, and have never been remotely tempted in the period since to have it back, despite some mildly threatening correspondence that keeps on implying wrongly that I avidly watch a choice of several hundred channels a day, vainly trying to trace through the morass of technology just one solitary programme that may be the diamond in the rough, all for the sake of £150 per year, or if I was really a miserly skinflint, £50.50 for a black and white set, eschewing ultra-widescreen telly in full HD, which embarrassingly shows up the wrinkled, pock-marked, crater-filled visages of various male/female presenters.actors and celebs whom we once thought of possessing flawless, baby-like skins and complexions. They would still appear glamorous on good old monochrome presumably, of which there are 7,000 households that steadfastly refuse to move with the times.

So I am bitter and twisted regarding social media, laptops and the unending distraction of i-phones, where it seems every other person walking down the street or on public transport is more concerned in texting or sending a message to some loved one in Mongolia or Manchester than interacting with specimens of humanity alongside them who are probably doing the same thing, turning us all into cold, dead-eyed automatons.

Yet what really enrages me now is the state of TV, more accurately British TV. Why should I be since my licence to watch has long since departed? Hypocrite, you ask? Well yes, to a certain point, but I still am forced to stare reluctantly at the box when I visit friends or go into pubs or various other public places, or watch programmes on video sharing websites such as YouTube. Though again I should be described as a dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite as I mainly watch small extracts if I can be bothered of contemporary TV, and wallow in indulgent nostalgia when watching the shows of my childhood throughout the 1970's, or on DVD.

Were the Seventies the Golden Age of Television?, as asked by the journalist, author and sometime TV and film critic Brian Viner about the time his book "Nice To See It, To See It Nice" was published a decade ago, an amusingly self-deprecating, anecdotal, but mostly detailed and informative essay in watching television during his formative years in the seaside resort of Southport in the 70's, a place familiar to me in that period as I often went for day trips there with my family, being of the same generation as Viner himself (born in the 60's), so can perhaps agree that the much maligned decade of oil shocks, inflation, and industrial unrest represented the medium at its artistic peak.

I seem to recall a survey that may have been organised by the BBC that had its participants indeed vote the 70's as their favourite era of British TV, with the 2000's apparently as their least favourite. Yet the description "Best" could be easily interpreted as a contradiction of terms, and should be interpreted with caution. Being lucky enough to watch TV in my formative years during the decade, I would agree television was perhaps at its cultural and artistic apex, though I was a young child at the time and too tender in years to see more adult-orientated dramas, documentaries and comedies, having to catch up on them from the late teens onward to fully appreciate their quality. There were of course just three mainstream channels at the time, with an average day on BBC 1 and ITV (The Granada region in my case) broadcasting around 12 hours a day, with BBC 2 starting their main schedules from 7pm in the evening for five hours if the viewer was lucky, with colour TV licences only starting to outnumber black and white equivalents from 1976, with then major technological advances such as home video recorders only starting to become available to the public towards the end of the decade and the early 80's.

And this was the "Golden Age of Television" you ask again? Viner himself explained "less meant more [quality]", and he was possibly right. Another description which is more accurate, perhaps, is that less television meant less bad television. The classic shows from the period indeed do represent British TV at its very best, but don't get the idea that every single programme was a well-crafted masterpiece as there still was an awful lot of disposable junk, dull wallpaper-type TV presented by stolid and uncharismatic presenters,  and sitcoms and sketch shows that were enjoyed by millions that that have dated badly and are virtually unwatchable nearly five decades on, examples of which I hope to touch on in the next part of this personal essay.

I also will refer to some of the most erudite, pithy, witty, but respected and revered TV critics and writers of their respective eras whenever possible: Clive James (70's-early 80's), Victor Lewis-Smith (90's-2000's), Charlie Brooker (2000's), and other relevant writers such as Joe Moran, Ray Fitzwalter, and the aforementioned Brian Viner, adding embellishments to their informed and intelligent observations on the medium as to support the conclusion that yes, modern TV is generally "awful" and has long seen its best days, though with constructive suggestions that may bring a revival of higher standards again.

It is not just the mainstream channels, but the interminable number of freeview and prescribed TV stations that have a grim and relentless obsession with the medium's most prominent contribution to 21st Century culture, namely Reality TV. I will discuss this so-called phenomenon of the digital age in another post in due course, but in brief detail, this has arguably if not conclusively brought down standards of quality and taste since the dawn of the millennium, though the first stirrings of such a decline made their presence felt in the 1990's as the new Broadcasting Act, brought in at the decade's beginning and one of then PM Margaret Thatcher's last pieces of legislation, gradually started to make its impact, and what is generally agreed, a very negative impact at that, which again will be a subject of more detailed discussion later.

To conclude the preliminaries, let us discuss a TV play written by Nigel Kneale and first broadcast in July 1968, The Year of the Sex Olympics, and the reality TV dating show, "Love Island", which was a considerable ratings hit for ITV 2 this summer. So what does a 50 year-old play by a highly respected sci-fi writer have to do with a quintessentially modern reality TV show? More than you would think actually, as Kneale's dystopian satire predicted with uncanny accuracy the future craze for reality TV, as the play opens with a hyperactive female host Misch (Vickery Turner) presenting various photogenic young couples in "Sportsex" ("Tonight, and every night...", as the continuity announcer explains), an interactive show where the viewers vote in and nominate their favourite couples in the act of love, as the TV executives (Brian Cox, Leonard Rossiter), known as the "High Drives" observe the apathetic reactions via CCTV of the viewers (The Low Drives), which seems to be achieving the desired affect of putting them off sex and therefore controlling over population, with other shows dissolving into crude slapstick involving the waste of food and pie throwing, After a technician falls off some scaffolding to his death while trying to show more artistic culture (via his paintings), the Low Drives react with hysterical laughter. The High Drives then propose a separated couple, along with their young daughter, go to live on an isolated island in primitive conditions, while being filmed 24 hours a day, while planting without their knowledge a violent criminal on the island that will create much needed "tension", with no one sure what may happen as a result...

All kinds of reality shows can be recalled from Kneale's predictions for the medium: Big Brother, Survivor, Love Island itself and many others.

Kneale lived long enough for his gloomy forebodings of the medium to become reality, if you can excuse such a term, but there was the most extraordinary but eerie coincidence towards the end of July as virtually to the same day and time (with barely 5 minutes difference), the so-called final of Love Island began when The Year of the Sex Olympics did 50 years earlier on BBC 2.

So what can I say about Love Island? Not much actually, as it appears very similar to the "Sportsex" hybrid of 5 decades before. I did actually watch occasional scenes from the virtual remake, not set in a drab TV studio but sunny climes in Spain, with photogenic himbos and bimbos, the former examples inevitably enhanced by pumping iron in some nondescript corporate gym (or maybe not), and the latter displaying the effects of pumping botox, with the question who will pair up with who and sleep with who and maybe go all the way (as one contestant apparently did two years ago and was promptly thrown off the programme).

I watched some of the show at a friend's house this summer, and it was far better to watch it with the sound muted as the Spanish locations were pleasant to look at, as indeed the contestants were in a kind of mutton-headed, spoon-out-your-eyeballs kind of way, not wanting to look as it was the ultimate insult to one's dignity yet you were drawn to games and tasks that were too sophisticated even for the standard degradations you would find on a Club 18-30 holiday, itself now a thing of the past as it made its farewell this October.

Once the sound was turned up, any merit the programme had immediately vanished. Some young model from Liverpool made less than an intellectual interjection about the Brexit crisis, in essence no worse or better than Boris Johnson, David Davis or Theresa May, a kind of touchstone to how modern culture has dumbed down alarmingly in the last decade or so. The philosophy of the programme makers was that as long as the contestants were replete in (very) skimpy swimwear, it didn't matter what they said but how they looked, a shallow thesis where how you appear on the outside is more than what qualities are on the inside, and to be honest, they wasn't any evidence to suggest there was anything whatsoever on the inside, particularly brain cells, of which I expected a major fight to break out as the contestants to fight over the sparse few that may have been available.

Programmes such as this have perhaps turned out far worse than Nigel Kneale could have ever envisaged, yet thanks to saturation coverage and even discussion hybrids (After Sun) that go on around an hour, such Prole Feed for the masses was even mulled over by The Guardian in vast detail during its run, as it does with other reality fodder (Bake-Off, Strictly Come Dancing, The Apprentice, I'm a Celebrity,etc.), no doubt hyped further by coverage in the tabloids and celeb mags. But if it comes to a great piece of television written by a distinguished writer such as Kneale, increasingly rare these days of course, the tabloids and even broadsheets such as The Graun hardly want to know.

There were so many scenes and incidents that could be termed a point blank imitation by Love Island over its immeasurably superior dramatic original of five decades earlier, one of them being a pathetic sequence where the himbos and the bimbos hurl custard pies at each other, hilarious to the contestants but wretchedly unfunny to the viewers involved. It was also crude and unfunny in Kneale's original, but it had a dramatic and satirical point to make and was therefore intentionally serious. The modern version was merely pointless, ham fisted and stupid, in line with the cynicism of the programme makers intended in the original.

Such an opus like this would have been unthinkable in the 70's to virtually all viewers of the time including myself, but Kneale had a sixth sense what was going to happen, "Sooner Than You Think", as the opening subtitle forewarned. Reality TV, Bread and Circuses for the modern generation.

The last word should be left to Victor Lewis-Smith, quoted from his book "TV Reviews" that compiled many opinions on 21st Century TV from his columns in the London Evening Standard as he became as disillusioned as myself with the stark fall and decline in quality:

"...over the past couple of decades, television has undoubtedly fragmented and degenerated, from a medium where a mighty handful of well-resourced channels offered us a communal viewing experience, into a world of a thousand satellite channels (many of which are barely watched or funded at all)...I witnessed the decline of television in sorrow and anger, and can fairly claim to have seen it coming...In every branch of entertainment...there is an immutable law of inverse proportions between quality and quantity.If you open thirty theatres on a single street in a small town that can barely sustain one local rep company, then expect execrable productions from all of them. Why does anyone expect multi-channel television to fare any better?"

I hope I can explain in the near future why VLS was so accurate in his opinions, as he sadly appears to have given up TV criticism for good (as presumably he cannot take any more programmes that are so bad).