What's so awful about daytime television?

Generally, daytime television seems to get a bad press, that it's cheap, lazy, time-filling programming, watched only by the elderly, house-bound, students, the unemployed and those who have nothing better to do with their time during the day. Which may be true, up to a point. The BBC doesn't do a copy of what ITV does with their programming, and manages to put out a fairly wide range of programmes from when Breakfast ends at 9.15 a.m. to around when the evening news is broadcast at 6p.m. If anything there seems to be an over-abundance of shows related to antiques and selling houses and make-overs. 'Homes Under The Hammer' is at least worth watching if only to see how prospective developers manage to make a good (or bad) job of restoring and decorating houses that at first glance are little more than disaster areas. It does at least encourage people to do up properties which were wrecks and so add to the housing stock instead of green space being built on. It's always interesting to see the results of developer's hard work and effort and it's not all about making vast profits from selling the properties in question. On the other hand, another house-selling show comes on mid-afternoon on BBC1, 'Escape To The Country,' where couples with more money than sense, having decided they want to give up city living and sell their homes and move away to some idyllic spot in the countryside. The presenters show them three properties which fit certain criteria, such as it has to has space for granny or grandpa, room for a herd of alpacas to graze, or perhaps have stabling for several horses or ponies as well have an ample-sized kitchen and perhaps views over rolling hills, meadows or the sea. I often wonder if they're just keen to show off their homes to their friends and family, and buy somewhere they can retire to which has far too much space and umpteen bedrooms which their guests can use when they visit perhaps once a year. Do they never think, when they're viewing these fantastic country properties, how far the nearest supermarket is, or the doctor's surgery or indeed, the nearest urban settlement, how much farm traffic they're likely to encounter on their way to work (wherever that may be) when they're very likely to be stuck behind a slow-moving combine harvester, tractor and trailer or herds of sheep being moved from one field to another, or even what it's like mid-winter then there's six foot of snow and the roads around their beloved property are closed off due to drifting show or there's ungritted road surfaces to deal with.

The BBC has a couple of shows which use recycling as the basis for their format, such as 'Money For Nothing' where the presenter, who is usually a designer/maker, visits a tidy-tip or recycling centre in a town and search out pieces of furniture and other material which people are bringing in to be scrapped and manages to remove these items before they are skipped. Then it is taken away to be restored and redesigned into new and improved pieces of furniture or whatever. What makes it remarkable is that these items, once they're tarted up, are sold on at profit and the money made is given to the people who dumped the items at the tidy-tip in the first place. A good example to us all that what we throw away and might find useless can become amazing once restored and given a new life, so saving them from land-fill.

There are some daytime television programmes which are useful, not merely in the schedules to fill up space. One such might be 'Fake Britain' which is sometimes shown in peak viewing time. It deals with consumer matters, mostly about items which are fake (hence the title, obviously) and some are items which you wouldn't otherwise think of as being faked, such as passports, electrical equipment such as hair straighteners, mobile chargers as well as websites which offer tickets for concerts and shows at knockdown prices but which turn out to be worthless. Also, all manner of scams which would go unnoticed until shows such as these alert the public to them.

Antiques seem to be something of an obsession on daytime television. 'Bargain Hunt' has been around for what seems like ages, first presented by David Dickinson and then Tim Wannacott, and more recently, since he left, it has been presented by a wide range of antiques experts which keeps it fresh and lively. Two teams of couples are given £300 to spend in an hour on antiques at various venues across the country and then attempt to make a profit at auction. Each team has an expert who helps them select their items and then, once they've bought their three items the expert spends what's remaining of the £300 on a bonus items which the teams can either accept or reject at auction. You can actually learn quite a lot from these sorts of shows as the experts discuss the various antique items the teams select. I had never heard of many of makers such as Lalique, Moorcroft or Clarice Cliff before I began watching this show. Later in the day there's 'Flog It' and later still, 'Antiques Road Trip' which is a programme where to antiques experts cross the country and stop at various towns with antique shops in them to buy items which are then sold at auction. The profit made is then given to charity.

There are now far too many gameshows on both channels. ITV has three which run one after the other, 'Tenable,' 'Tipping Point,' and 'The Chase.' It just seems cheap and simple for them to churn out this stuff, nothing wrong with either, although some of the questions on 'Tipping Point' and embarrassingly easy and an insult to anyone's intelligence, for example, 'what colour is the sky?' or' which month does Christmas fall?' Why do so many of the gameshows have such garish sets? The set for 'Tenable,' for example, is a really bright green. All have similar digital graphics and almost all have equally annoying sound effects, particularly when contestants win or something else happens during the course of game-play. Repetitive sounds which really get on your nerves, to say the least. 

Crazy Daytime Television

Watching a great deal of daytime television over the months, it's made me think of new formats for programmes. There are lots of shows about buying and selling, antiques as well as houses. People with an obsession about moving to the country as well as Australia. There's probably far too many, but that's another story. Just turn these formats on their head and you get some interesting ideas. 'Pointless', the gameshow, which is on at teatime, took the idea of people knowing about obscure answers, and thus, getting the lowest score,  unlike 'Family Fortunes' which was the opposite, getting as many points on answers to certain questions got higher scores and if so, you'd be a winner. Why not a show where people who've moved to Australia suddenly decide they want to move back to the United Kingdom? In 'Wanted Down Under,' families put themselves through the hoop travelling all that way and deciding whether it's a good idea to leave family and friends behind in Britain to move all that way, find a job and then a home to live in. I just wonder if some people are just going on the show so they get a free holiday to Australia, a nice week stooging around, looking at houses and talking to people who might or might not give you a job. All that emotional upset, leaving granny or grandpa behind, missing friends and neighbours, but think of all the problems of moving to the other side of the world. Then there's the other shows, 'Escape To The Country.' Instead of selling up and moving to a rural cottage, with a kitchen which is far too big, with acres of land, room to keep a pony, a tennis court and a huge lawn which needs mowing every couple of weeks, Do these people who go through all this trouble take into consideration what living in the countryside consists of? How far is the nearest Tesco branch, or Sainsbury's? How far away is it to the nearest shop if you run out of milk, what is it going to be like if you move to a house half-way up a hill in the Yorkshire Dales, how are you going to cope when you get woken at 6 o'clock in the morning by a cockerel crows, a cow moos or sheep start bleating? Or, if you are late home from work in the evening, caught behind a tractor and trailer or a herd of sheep or cows being moved along the narrow lanes around where you live? So, let's have a television show about people who get fed up with life in the country and decide that they want to 'Escape To The City.' They just long for a home where you can stand up straight and not hit your head on low beams, long to be able to walk on nice, clean pavements instead of muddy pathways, have lots of choice when it comes to finding ideal places to buy their milk, don't have to worry about having a broadband connection, and don't have to be woken in the early hours of the morning by cows mooing to be milked or cockerels crowing. Instead, they're woken by car alarms going off and not being turned off. They don't mind having to find a place to park and getting a parking ticket.  Oh, the joys of being oh so ironic!

We'd come up with another sort of 'buying and selling' show. Instead of buying something and selling it at auction and attempting to make a profit (such as in 'Bargain Hunt, 'Flog It,' or 'Antiques Road Trip.) the contestants have to either 'skip it or sell it.' Some of the stuff people buy in these shows is really good quality, but you could buy real tat, something worthless, kitch, and you have a panel of people who have to decide whether the item is worth keeping or whether it goes in a  skip or is crushed in a crusher. You could go through someone's' home selecting the items to be skipped or sold. A good way to clear a home of clutter. Perhaps, instead of having a skip, you could shoot the item out of a canon into space, or you could put it on a wall and throw balls at it until it breaks. Just think of the worst-possible gift someone has been given and is sitting at the back of a cupboard and they don't every use it. This could be a good way to get rid of it. It might have horrible memories in some way or other. 

Crazy Television

Why do we have to have so many trailers on television? I don't mean for films, but for television shows. They seem to show the same clips for a drama, for example, and it surely ruins the actual show because if there's several clips which are extracted from that show, they're just going to spoil the surprise element and just destroy that programme. If it's a comedy show, then, to have some of the comic moments shown endlessly during a trailer is going to kill any sense of humour that may have been in that particular show. Having said that, they're running trailers for my least-favourite programme, 'EastEnders,' where all the most dramatic 'bits' are squeezed into about 30 seconds and actually improves this programme. Whenever the famous introductory music starts, we always reach for the remote and switch channels or turn the television 'off.'

To the question 'why so many trailers on television?' I'd say, so we know a new show is coming up in the near future and the producers want us to watch. Which I suppose is obvious.

I've mentioned how they have to squeeze the credits at the end of a programme into a horrible narrow strip and insist on telling you what's coming up. Why does the announcer have to speak over the credits and why on earth do the credits have to be rushed through so fast that you can't possibly read them clearly? Just an insult on the actors as well as the production staff.

Something else I hate about television is when directors and cameramen insist on using crazy angles to shoot film or video. WHY I have to ask? It can be very unsettling. Also, using what they call 'whip-pans' (I think I have the correct term for this) when they spin the camera around quickly, perhaps cutting from one place to another. It makes you feel sick. Then there's this thing they have of filming people as they walk along, which can make you feel sort of sea-sick, or at least motion-sick. I feel sorry for the cameraman having to walk along backwards to follow the actor or presenter. It must be difficult, probably having to avoid colliding with furniture or, worse still if it's outside, falling into a ditch or running into whatever is in the way.

Daytime television: why are there endless programmes about couples selling houses? Some are fine, such as 'Homes Under The Hammer,' because it's about people who buy empty, probably derelict houses, at auction, and you then see how they manage to transform them and then sell them on at quite large profit or rent them out. At least they're giving people homes and preventing houses being built on greenfield sites and increasing the housing stock. But it the programmes about couples who have so much money, from selling one over-priced properties, usually in the South East and London, and have this fantasy about moving to an idealised rural property with a 'large kitchen,' and 'space for a pony' or most likely it someone who's retiring and has got money from a bonus working in the city or it's from being a director of a company or business they've had something to do with and got share options. . . the show I'm thinking about is called 'Escape To The Country' and it's on virtually every day, in the afternoon.

More Niggles: Television- Part 2

What's next on my list of niggles regarding television? How about the over-abundance of similar shows, such as antiques and cookery? One or two would be fine, but why do schedulers think that the viewer is going to relish the possibility of a rash of the same sort of show? Crazy. All the fuss about Great British Bake Off transferring to Channel 4 was totally over-the-top. I can't honestly see how it can be worth £75 million or thereabout, even if it's for five years. There are a couple of antique shows we watch and enjoy, such as Bargain Hunt and Flog It! Well, they just happen to be on at the right time, when we have lunch or tea and at least you learn something about antiques. Then there's 'lifestyle' shows, doing up houses, 'Escape To The Country' as well as 'Homes Under The Hammer.' Why do the people who go on something like 'Escape To The Country' want to move to the middle of nowhere, North Yorkshire or somewhere in Cornwall, miles from anywhere, a long drive to the nearest supermarket or a hospital or doctor? They generally have more money than sense and they want a huge house with more bedrooms than they really need. If you're going to move once you retire, why not just down-size and spend the money you have left over because you've gone for a smaller, more economical house? It's just so you can invite your friends and family and impress them with your new, huge home.

Day-time television is awash with selling things. Virtually every programme has some aspect of selling, such as houses to antiques. It's the same thing as I've already mentioned. Once a show is found to be a success with an audience they seem to think that we'll want more and more of the same.

Why do these shows have the same music on their soundtracks? I can't understand why, when they make some programmes, usually documentaries, they have to use the SAME music which gets recycled endlessly. Perhaps the budgets for these shows don't allow for original scores and they use royalty-free library music. It's the most likely reason, but the same rather clichéd music seems to do the rounds of such shows as 'Antiques Road Trip.'

Not just antiques and cooking, but during the afternoon there seem to be endless gameshows. There's nothing wrong with a really good gameshow. 'The Chase' is currently a huge hit on I.T.V. at teatime. It's main selling-point would be that Bradley Walsh is the questionmaster. He has a good repport with the contestants and can, occasionally, corpse when a rather risqué answer comes up on the three answers the contestants have to select. Then there's The Chasers, who are usually good value for money. Then the questions are quite difficult. I hate those gameshows which have questions that are, frankly, an insult to one's intelligence. The worst offender in that department is 'Tipping Point.' We've watched this addictive show, but some of the questions are, to be honest, an insult. Such questions as 'What month is Christmas?', 'What colour is the sky?' Doh! Who really thought that a gameshow that is really a version of those machines that you'd find at the fair or on a seaside pier, where you put a few pennies in a slot and the machine has different shelves or 'layers' that move backwards and forward and you have to get the coins to fall over the edge to win? Crazy.

Day-time television is awash with selling things. Virtually every programme has some aspect of selling, such as houses to antiques. It's the same thing as I've already mentioned. Once a show is found to be a success with an audience they seem to think that we'll want more and more of the same.

Why do these shows have the same music on their soundtracks? I can't understand why, when they make some programmes, usually documentaries, they have to use the SAME music which gets recycled endlessly. Perhaps the budgets for these shows don't allow for original scores and they use royalty-free library music. It's the most likely reason, but the same rather clichéd music seems to do the rounds of such shows as 'Antiques Road Trip.'

Something that really gets on my nerve and that's the need for producers of television shows to have 'what's coming next' at the beginning of a show. 'Bargain Hunt' does this. I quite like this show, but why do I need to get a glimpse of what's going to happen? I'm quite capable of staying with a programme to find out. I don't need this stupid element. It's taking up valuable running-time. Then, most drama series have to have 'Next time . . .' and you get a glimpse of the next episode. Totally unnecessary. Something pinched from American television which is best off being ditched. I know that a lot of our shows are either sold to American television or are co-productions, but it's as if you're not going to stick with a long-running series (or 'season' as we have to call a long-running drama series, also pinched from America.) And a great deal of fuss is made out of the final episode of a run of shows, or 'series' or 'season.' Now called 'Finale.' Which sort of separates it from the rest of the run of shows.