“On the first day of Christmas TV gave to me,
Hours of depressing soap operas!”
It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.
Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.
We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.
(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)
We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.
Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.
I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.
Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.
It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.
The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.
And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.
Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.
It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.
Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.
Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.
Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.
And now ‘My Family’.
Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.
A nice dream.
And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!
Will
No comments:
Post a Comment