Day One Hundred & Twenty Six: TVpression

Dear David,

Part two of today's musings. Isn't the TV a load of old shite? This evening I have had adultery, abuse, violence and this culminated in a show about bad carers slapping mentally ill people. I am now being subjected to a show about people talking about social issues in Scotland and how we can resolve them. It has just turned into a big moaning session. This is the thing I cannot stand about these programmes; there is no action, no resolution and no end state. I mean what is the point of highlighting an issue and there being little or no follow-up?

More importantly what happened to light entertainment? Where is the fun, the music, the dancing girls? I mean I am not advocating that television become vacuous, inane and sugary but oh my god, does it all need to be earthy, gritty and real. Does it all need to be grey? And when it is not grey, does it need to be brash and vulgar?

I found myself this Sunday watching re-runs of Agatha Christie adaptions. I know there will a conclusion, a happy-ish ending and that everybody will be dreadfully posh and wonderfully twee. I like things that are well-written, while having an element of the formulaic. I like an ending and like when we they don't show the horrific mugging of an eldery woman as graphically as possible but instead talk in hushed tones of the coshing of old ladies, which incidentally is a wonderful word.

I can feel the white rage becoming white hot having had to watch the shit I have had to watch tonight but virtue of being in the living room so that I can work on my laptop. Some man has just said that given that we are the Scottish race gave the world the Enlightenment, we should be able to cure all our social ills. I think Hutcheson and Hume are turning in their respective graves.

The dreadful show is an audience-based show discussing another TV show called The Scheme, a show about a housing estate and its residents in Kilmarnock. They are discussing the social problems that were highlighted in the program. Throwing Hume into the equation was one of the most stupid and depressing moments of the show, as some wannabe intellectual tried to ram the Scottish Enlightment rather forcefully into the conversation as some kind of solution for drug addiction, unemployment and the ruination of generation upon generation of individuals.

So now I am watching Glee online and it's lovely and everyone is singing.

Kikicee