Television Sucks

Originally printed in Issue 96, Screenwriting.

Whether you call it 'audience-directed programming' or 'dumbing down', TV programmers have been coasting along the middle of the road for some time now. Screenwriter Tony Philpott pulls them over to check their license..

Television Sucks. Or does it? Several years ago the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison wrote a critique of the world¹s most ubiquitous electronic medium. It was called The Glass Teat. His premise in this two-volume work was simple: Television does not suck, but is sucked. We take sustenance from the images flickering just behind the surface of the household cathode-ray tube, they are a source of comfort drawn from a vitrified mother's breast. Funnily enough, Ellison wrote The Glass Teat in the late seventies or early eighties - a time when television was still interesting, a time when television still had a little fizz left in it, a time before it became the Glass Teat dispensing the one-flavour-only breast-milk it does today. Ellison could see it coming, but even his prescience could not have anticipated I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. He was writing at a time when television was still flavoured with a variety of tastes, a time before reality television, before home-decorating shows, before B-list celebrity shows, before the fly-on-the-wall camera in The Salon started feeding us riveting images of leg waxes and nail-biting cuticle enhancements.

In a recent industry magazine a Channel 4 executive hails the new trend in television as Audience Directed Programming. I call it dumbing down. But this is no mere dumbing down of an individual programme, this is the removal of intelligence from an entire medium. Whereas dumbing down was once an occasional act of executive interference in the creative process, it is now, with the acceptance of Audience Directed Programming, a tenet of broadcaster policy. Don't get me wrong, I am a populist - I like popular and even formulaic films and television, I liked Armageddon, I liked Speed, I watch Heartbeat most Sundays. All good stuff, well-made and created to fill a programming niche or conform to a cinematic formula. But I also liked Cracker, The Remains of the Day and The Hours.

Audience Directed Television, by its very name, tells us that creators and creativity are in the process of being replaced, or even worse, being forced to conform to the aesthetic of some homogenised norm. But the norm is big. The norm has spending power. And what the norm wants, the norm now gets. It has given broadcasters a revenue-driven, audience-researched mandate to convert viewers into Heineken-drinking, bran-flake eating, Nike-wearing consumers. If the Glass Teat no longer dispenses creative or intellectual nutrition it certainly keeps our bran-filled bowels moving and our senses pleasantly dulled by the buzz of booze. No-risk television - advertising targets established before a programme is commissioned. Market inspired cinema - merchandising rights sold before a frame is shot. It is an approach that has replaced actors with stars, an approach that keeps Fair City on air, but above all it is an approach in search of a lobotomised audience. And if it can't find one it will perform the necessary surgery itself (watch two episodes of Fair City and tell me you don't feel like you've had your frontal lobes cauterised into imbecility).

Once upon a prime time, television did take the odd risk, it even raised the creative bar on a number of occasions challenging writers and audiences to stretch themselves.

Some will recall an episode of Cracker in which Robbie Coltrane vowed to his long-suffering wife that he would give up the booze and quit gambling. The opening scene in a following episode has Cracker on the phone in a close-up shot of his back as he tells his wife that he is on his way home for dinner. He tells hers he's in a shop (I think) picking up some bread. Off-camera at the same moment, we hear a casino croupier call for bets. This is heard by Cracker¹s wife through the phone. "You¹re in a casino, gambling, aren't you?", she declares. We see Cracker's shoulder¹s sag - he's been sussed. But instead of the expected angry outburst from his wife, he hears her say, quite gently: "Not to worry, I'll keep dinner hot. Be home when you can." There is a long, surprised pause from Cracker, then he responds with: "And how are things in Damascus, darling?" There are many would not have seen the Damascus reference for what it was Cracker's likening of his wife's sudden change of attitude to the equally sudden conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus. But there are many who would. The Biblical reference didn't damage the scene for those who didn't get it, but it sure as Hell brought an intelligent little extra to the scene for those who did. At the risk of confusing that segment of the audience over whose heads the Damascus reference flew, broadcast executives who studied at the school of Audience Directed Programming would have had it cut from the scene.

But there is now an even more sinister development. Writers, including myself, are anticipating the broadcaster's excision of these little bonuses of wit and intelligence from scripts. And many who are tempted to elevate their work to a more well-informed aesthetic are aborting their own words before they are born. Writers are slowly becoming aware that fighting for them is futile - the norm outnumbers us. There may well be a kind of Custer's last stand - a writers' Little Big Horn in defence of intelligence - and like the defiant Custer we will certainly fall. But the dirge that accompanies the funeral of creativity will be drowned out by the cheery advertising jingle - after all, isn't there deodorant to be sold, isn't the ludicrously-enthusiastic man in the red jumper luring us all to Power City with lowered toaster prices, and isn't there a new stamina-enhancing Lucozade the world is just waiting to guzzle?

Years ago Audi introduced the Audi 100, a car with the lowest drag factor of any automobile. Its shape slipped it through the resistance of the wind like no other car. Their competitors followed suit - people wanted low drag, give it to them - audience directed automobiles. But there is an optimum shape for the lowest possible wind resistance. Had car manufacturers continued down the low drag road the laws of aerodynamics would have ensured that all cars would have eventually had to arrive at the very same shape. Nothing, apart from the maker's badge, would have differentiated one vehicle from another. Television is going the same way, not shaped by the wind, but shaped by a mass-audience that is being given permission to drive it down the Middle Of The Road. It's a dangerous place, the middle of the road, it's where creativity meets the same fate as a splattered hedgehog on the Port Laoise by-pass.