The WAL

My dentist has got it figured out.  He’s installed TVs in the ceiling.  Lie back in the chair, here are you headphones and remote.  Say ah.  Neither the hygenist nor the dentist is forced to make small talk that you can’t respond to because you’re completely distracted channel surfing and they can focus on what they’re supposed to be doing.  The visit goes faster so even though it’s billed at the same rate they can probably see more patients and you get to watch an episode of the Colbert Report that you missed the night before, or whatever your favourite show happens to be.  It’s nothing short of brilliant.  Now, if my physiotherapist would do the same thing so I’d be distracted while he’s working on my knee…

Note that I’ve switched the target length back to 70k.  Obviously, I never should have panicked and changed it in the first place since my characters have made sure I’m on the right track.  Right now I’m inside the last chapter, although I think I might need a short resolution chapter after it, and technically I haven’t actually written Chapter 13, only outlined it (a short Chapter, probably under 2000 words).  We’ll see what the ultimate length winds up being.

Don’t get me wrong. I like TV. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) applies, but the 10% that’s left over contains some wonderful and amazing stuff as well as some good news reporting. Some of the 90% can be entertaining, too, but usually only in passing. So yes, I like TV.

But there are times I wish we’d never gotten cable again.

We turned the cable off a few months prior to the birth of our first child (there are three), reasoning that we didn’t need to throw away that fifty dollars per month for something we weren’t going to have time to watch anyway and we’d pick it up (or satellite) again some day when our youngest child was old enough to understand the purpose of advertising. (She’s four and a bit now, and has a loose grasp because we’ve explained it, but it doesn’t stop her from asking for things she sees in commercials. Her older sister has a solid understanding of what advertising is for, but that doesn’t stop her from asking for things, either. Their older brother is just a little more subtle about it. “Wow! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it, Dad?”)

We turned it back on a couple of months ago and there are days I wish we hadn’t. Today is one of those days.

I do like TV, but my kids like it a lot more. Too much. We regulate a bit so that they’re not always in front of the mind-sucking box and that helps sometimes. But really, it isn’t so much that they like TV too much, it’s that they talk about it too much.

They talk about their favourite TV show. They talk about the TV show they just watched. They talk about the TV show they’re about to watch. They talk about their favourite part of the movie they saw on TV last week. They talk about the cool TV show that’s going to be on next week. They talk about the segment of the TV show they’ve just watched while the commercial is on. They talk about the commercial they just saw while the TV show is on. They talk about TV shows they’re not allowed to watch. They talk about TV shows they’ve never seen. They sing along with theme songs, with commercials. They sing theme songs and commercials in the yard, in the van, in the bath, while not watching TV, while watching other things on TV. They quote lines from TV shows, from movies they’ve seen on TV, from commercials. Over and over and over and over and over and…

Let’s just say they talk about TV.

And let’s also say that today is one of the days I regret cable, even though they didn’t actually watch much TV. Today.

Working in a casino, my hours are odd, so sometimes I see some TV that most people miss. Add to that cable being new to me again after a decade’s absence and a male predilection for channel surfing and I’ve been running across quite a lot of odd stuff lately.

This morning, just before 6, I happened upon an infomercial for the Girls Gone Wild videos by mail offer. Really. Half an hour long by the guide, this show-length exercise in appealing to the reptilian part of my brain featured large amounts of barely censored footage of college-age (it’s a US production) girls exposing various parts of their bodies, making out with each other, and just about to engage in a variety of sexual acts either solo or with another girl.

For $9.99, you can receive the first (and completely uncensored) DVD in the collection. After that, one will arrive in the mail every month (in a plain paper package, one assumes) priced at $19.99 - keep only what you buy.

Yes, really.

I don’t object to porn so long as everyone involved has willingly consented. I also don’t object to anyone making a reasonable profit from their efforts (let’s not even think about drug companies). In the case of Girls Gone Wild, however, compensation for the girls going wild is generally in the form of a GGW T-shirt. I repeat, the videos arrive priced at $19.99. Can you say exploitation, boys and girls?

I think what bothers me the most about this is that the infomercial was on from 530 to 6 in the morning. Two of my children are occasionally up at that time of day, if not usually until about 630. Fortunately, the lockout controls are fairly effective on TV, but it is only a four-digit code and my 8-year-old is pretty smart when it comes to technology (the younger ones aren’t far behind).

There is an amusing side to this, too. The show that immediately followed the smut of the month club ad was “Peter Popoff’s Miracle Ministry.” I laughed for a while as my thumb went back to switching channels.

So many things to be irritated about, so little time.

I don’t like reality television.  I get plenty of reality in my reality, enough that I’m not at all interested in the staged variety.  Still, I recognize it as a big part of the television world over the last few years and doubt that will change anytime soon.

That said, Big Brother is one of the best known franchises in the business.  Enough so that it’s been done in dozens of countries and languages around the world, mocked by sit-coms, cartoons, and the odd SF show alike.  Everyone who watches TV at all knows what it is and is at least familiar with the basic concept: lock a bunch of people in a house containing cameras to film every second of every day, broadcast the highlights, once per week or so take an audience poll to vote one of them out.  Yawn, sounds exciting, right?  Well, perhaps in the face of flagging ratings, Big Brother UK is doing a celebrity version, pulling a group of mid-range and B-list celebrities with a couple of wild cards thrown in. 

One of those wildcards is Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood star brought in to ”bring some Bollywood glamour to proceedings and attract viewers with south Asian roots” (AFP care of Yahoo) and may have even been paid more to boot.  She has not had a good time, having been referred to by a couple of her housemates as “a dog”, “the Indian”, “Poppadom”, and possibly even ”Paki”.  She’s been ridiculed, laughed at, mocked, teased, and abused quite effectively.  No surprise, there are calls of racism.  Gee, ya think?

There have been thousands of complaints, an online petition, and at least one protest in India (thanks to CTV for this last bit of info) along with front page newspaper stories.  Politician’s in both countries have spoken out against the situation.

The housemates in question have apparently apologised (CP care of Yahoo).  A little late and with prompting, I expect, but Shilpa has graciously accepted.  A couple of her tormentors have lost contracts/endorsements and one is seeing a major perfume retailer drop her line, plus the show has lost an unnamed sponsor.

What’s almost as annoying as allowing this to go on in the first place is the response of network’s chief executive Andy Duncan: the show will continue, as it was unclear if the abuse was racist (CP care of Yahoo).  (Unclear?) Of course it’s going to continue.  It’s viewership has gone up 30% as a result of the controversy (CTV, at the bottom).

Hopefully, Shilpa will win, too.  I still don’t care for reality TV, but I always like a happy ending.

I love the news on American TV
Filled with journalistic integrity
Incredibly
Wonderfully
Reactionary
Opinionated and loud
Offended and proud
Facts under a cloud
Of secrecy
Hypocrisy
And idiocy
The truth can’t compete
With rage and deceit
And lies that repeat
With such frequency
They have to be
True, you see
Righteous indignation
Feeds vague imagination
Of crises in the nation
Such bold manipulation
For manifest destiny

Watching TV late at night,
The flickering light
And hyper infomercial voices
Drown my choices.
It’s very strange.
I lack the will to change
The channel to see
What else is on TV.
As if, somehow, I’d rather drown
My mind than shut the TV down
And try to keep
My eyes closed long enough to sleep.