Making The World A Better Place

I saw this thing on TV last night where a film producer or writer said that people with talent should use it wisely. Like, instead of producing a 5 years of a daily half hour soap-opera with just mere entertainment value, using that talent to make a film that really makes the audience think. That's just what I think is wrong with TV these days - all you have to do is sit and watch. Don't think about anything you watch, just look at it, laugh when there's a cue, go awwww when the recorded voices do so and just ignore anything unless it dares to cross your field of vision.

Even the stuff that is meant to make you think about the world differently, documentaries and culture programmes, often make a hollywood movie out of something that may be quite important. Nothing wrong with that, except, the audience just sits on the sofa lapping up everything, but aren't really compelled to do anything. The great shots of animals, people, and nature just fill us with emotion, but do we often remember what the message was about? One doc like that once in a while is pretty good. It stands out in the memory, and we might just remember it during the days we're meant to sit about and tell stories. But the problem is that there's hundreds of them on any of the hundreds of channels, and as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt.

Then there's the stuff that really bug me - the films, programmes and channels that really patronise your intelligence, and take the phrase "good taste" to new depths. A bit of swearing doesn't really annoy me. I swear a lot, compared to the people I hang around with. But the producers of these things seem to think that the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines a sentence as a group of words containing a verb and/or a phrase that is meant to insult/demean or expresses/suggests extreme frustration.

And there's comedy. There's a lot of satire and stuff around, but also a lot of slapstick. A balance of the suff is good. But again, there's too much of it sometimes. And we forget why it was funny in the first place.

I've just mentioned a few of the things that are on the box these days, feeling quite sure there's a lot more on TV that shouldn't be. The fact is, TV is a powerful medium cos a) almost everyone's got one, and b) it is visual, and stuff that's visual is pretty ... effective. And used in the right way, by the right people, it could get everyone to do something that makes the world a much better place to respire, excrete, respond, feed, grow etc. in. But, as everyone else in the world will be trying to tell me, a lot depends on the people who watch it. You can't blame everything on the guys on the other side of the screen. Viewing habits need to change. So next time something that isn't worth your attention is on, turn it off. Cos then they'll really know what you, and the world, deserve.