Over the last month or so I have had the feeling that I am someone seriously in need of a heart re-stringing and a course in Compassion 1.01. Every time I turn on the television and hear tales of woe from Victoria’s bushfires, I find myself callously moaning a low “whooo caaares”, much to the shock and disgust of my couch companion.
As a normally empathetic person who cares for all forms of life (I have been known, in my younger years, to have pulled the wings off the odd fly with tweezers, but I can assure you I am now completely reformed), I myself have been shocked by these thoughts. Hundreds of people have died, I tell myself, the number of houses, of homes lost, is in it’s thousands. How can I be so cold?
Then, while watching the news on a commercial station of questionable quality (a description so easily applicable to all three, I know, but I just like to keep you guessing), something became apparent to me.
The urgency and solemnity with which commercial news and current affairs readers report on such fickle issues as diet fads, dodgy tenants and the footy, makes a mockery of actual newsworthy items like the Victorian bushfires when they are ungracefully lumped in the same half hour.
One could hope that when these real issues emerge so unexpectedly from the sea of faux news items that they would seem especially significant and poignant by comparison, as in deed they should, but I fear this is not the case. Instead these meaningful and important issues seem to have a chameleon effect, blending in with the other items that viewers sensible enough to judge a dodgy tenant story’s* importance (or lack thereof) will promptly shrug off.
See it’s not that I am particularly insensitive (although a couple of wingless flies may beg to differ), it’s just that I have grown so accustomed to throwing the nearest un-secured object at the television screen in frustration every time a commercial news report comes on, that it has become an automatic reflex of sorts.
And this screen battering Terrets doesn’t stop at news and current affairs. Oh no. The array of spectacularly bad reality television shows on offer at the moment is hardly an original complaint, but I doubt anyone has broken as many coffee cups as I have in anger over the notion that obese people exercising is entertainment.
And I know that many hold the view that television programming has been on the slippery slope to shitsville for ages now, but is it just me, or has someone poured some extra grease on the slide in the last few months? Perhaps it as something to do with my being out of the country for most of summer - my perception I mean, not the actual programming, as I am in no way suggesting that the fate of Australian television rests on my presence within national borders, although isn’t that an interesting thought? No what I mean is, after being away from it for a while you come back to discover things you are glad you had forgotten. Like television programmers penchant for immediately thrusting a contract in the face of anyone who proclaims that “I tell it like it is. If I don’t like you, I’ll tell you. Uh ha!” Plus, you know, when I was away in Europe, once it hit midnight every channel just started showing soft-core porn, and that’s pretty hard to compete with really.
So for the sake of preservation of my coffee cups I think I’ll just stick to ABC and SBS for now. The fantastically smug “News from home, if you live in the world” slogan that SBS has taken on of late gives me the feeling that events like the bushfires will be put into context along side similarly significant events (and even, gasp, those that might have more significance).
I also ruled out the possibility of any kind of a social life on Wednesday nights again this year once I saw ABC’s line up. Another season of The Gruen Transfer will afford me many an opportunity to appreciate Wil Anderson’s particular elongated elf kind of attractiveness (oh yeah and the show’s pretty good too), and nothing beats the comforting, sitting down and chatting with your wise but hip parents feeling I get from watching Margaret and David’s adorable bickering on At The Movies (am I the only one who assumed for ages that they were married but just didn’t share a surname?) And if these shows go off the air, at least there’s the knowledge that I could revert to picking up the tweezers and taking my anger out on some flies. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
*Alright so I am mainly talking abut current affairs here. Perhaps I’m being a bit hard on the old newsreaders. Natarsha Belling, for instance, is a lass of considerable intelligence whom I particularly admire, if only she didn’t insist on spelling her name like such a wanker.
