Scan and Pan
I’ve been watching rather a lot of The Open University’s Mark Steel Lectures on the Arts Channel lately. It doesn’t seem to be working: I’m still more like Russell on Huff than Albert Einstein, but what can you do.
I was going to call this blog ‘Scan and Pan’ and write about the televisual feasts in which few other bloggers seem to be interested — Smint advertisements dubbed into English from exotic foreign languages (why?!); obscure optical effects on the Grigson cookery show (why?!).
But what would qualify me to comment on such matters? Well, I’ve got a couch, haven’t I. And — in an H.R. Giger-like fusion of flesh and cheap Sky Television plastic — I have this remote control welded to one of my hands. Apparently, I have too much time on them, too.
Some of you may be relieved to hear that I hardly ever watch reality TV. I have written elsewhere that my new reality TV show ‘concept’ is a group of young people locked in a house for a year surrounded by fake cameras.
I’m not going to write (much) about soaps because there are a lot of people doing that with far more passion and vitriol than I could ever muster. No, I wish to blog about the weird, out-of-kilter and utterly pointless stuff. Such as, where does the ACC get off spending money to tell us not to have accidents in the home? Has a single toe remained unbroken as a result of those ‘public service’ ads? If you need actors and a script to remind you not to fall over in the shower, you really shouldn’t be trusted with electricity, let alone Fruity Bars.
I am going to scan stuff, but I’m not always going to pan it. This blog already has a proper title, though, courtesy of my employer, the NZBC, so the Director General says I can’t really make use of ‘Scan and Pan’ here. OK. But he didn’t say I couldn’t use it as my first snappy headline, did he.
(You may be wondering whether Scan and Pan has any deeper significance. If so, this glossary should help.)
Moving swiftly in a cultural direction, does anyone else in New Zealand subscribe to the Arts Channel apart from me? And if so, do you watch it? Not that it isn’t good, at times. The old South Bank Show they’ve been showing with Martin Amis circa The Information is a TV classic. It would be nice to see some more new stuff on there, though.
The Arts Channel did a postal survey a while back, and followed it up with a market research phone call. I helped them out because I’m good like that. Too much opera and ballet, I told them, and not enough literature and visual arts (well, if I’m the only person watching it, they might as well pander to my whims). I also suggested they should consider repeating their programming during the day, instead of just showing me the same old promo film loop of virtuoso classical pianists, over and over again.
Since then, the Arts Channel has cut down on the promos and increased it programming (no, I’m not actually taking any credit for that, I’m sure there are one or two other bored viewers who made the same suggestion — I mean, how much more expensive can it be to put on a real show instead of a show reel?). Now, from 12 noon, you can watch the previous evening’s viewing all over again. So, when you lose the will to live half-way through the R.S. Thomas documentary rerun, you can give it yet another go once the medics have resuscitated you and you’re back on the couch, on a drip.
It’s a useful feature for those rainy weekends when there’s little else on, and the good stuff is all hidden away at ridiculous times and in unexpected places (Melvyn Bragg’s excellent The Adventure of English series, for example, languishing in the cultural desert of 10am on a Saturday morning on TV One — except when they decided to skip a week, right in the middle of the series, just for the hell of it… or was that just one of those TVNZ negative reality inversions?).
Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was the aforementioned Mark Steel Lectures — ‘Great Thinkers’ which is definitely the best thing on TV at the moment (Monday at 18:00 on the Arts Channel and repeated at various times during the week). The best thing apart from Huff, that is. But now you’re curious (go on, admit it), I think I shall deal to it in another post. That couch of mine doesn’t sag on its own, you know.
I was going to call this blog ‘Scan and Pan’ and write about the televisual feasts in which few other bloggers seem to be interested — Smint advertisements dubbed into English from exotic foreign languages (why?!); obscure optical effects on the Grigson cookery show (why?!).
But what would qualify me to comment on such matters? Well, I’ve got a couch, haven’t I. And — in an H.R. Giger-like fusion of flesh and cheap Sky Television plastic — I have this remote control welded to one of my hands. Apparently, I have too much time on them, too.
Some of you may be relieved to hear that I hardly ever watch reality TV. I have written elsewhere that my new reality TV show ‘concept’ is a group of young people locked in a house for a year surrounded by fake cameras.
I’m not going to write (much) about soaps because there are a lot of people doing that with far more passion and vitriol than I could ever muster. No, I wish to blog about the weird, out-of-kilter and utterly pointless stuff. Such as, where does the ACC get off spending money to tell us not to have accidents in the home? Has a single toe remained unbroken as a result of those ‘public service’ ads? If you need actors and a script to remind you not to fall over in the shower, you really shouldn’t be trusted with electricity, let alone Fruity Bars.
I am going to scan stuff, but I’m not always going to pan it. This blog already has a proper title, though, courtesy of my employer, the NZBC, so the Director General says I can’t really make use of ‘Scan and Pan’ here. OK. But he didn’t say I couldn’t use it as my first snappy headline, did he.
(You may be wondering whether Scan and Pan has any deeper significance. If so, this glossary should help.)
Moving swiftly in a cultural direction, does anyone else in New Zealand subscribe to the Arts Channel apart from me? And if so, do you watch it? Not that it isn’t good, at times. The old South Bank Show they’ve been showing with Martin Amis circa The Information is a TV classic. It would be nice to see some more new stuff on there, though.
The Arts Channel did a postal survey a while back, and followed it up with a market research phone call. I helped them out because I’m good like that. Too much opera and ballet, I told them, and not enough literature and visual arts (well, if I’m the only person watching it, they might as well pander to my whims). I also suggested they should consider repeating their programming during the day, instead of just showing me the same old promo film loop of virtuoso classical pianists, over and over again.
Since then, the Arts Channel has cut down on the promos and increased it programming (no, I’m not actually taking any credit for that, I’m sure there are one or two other bored viewers who made the same suggestion — I mean, how much more expensive can it be to put on a real show instead of a show reel?). Now, from 12 noon, you can watch the previous evening’s viewing all over again. So, when you lose the will to live half-way through the R.S. Thomas documentary rerun, you can give it yet another go once the medics have resuscitated you and you’re back on the couch, on a drip.
It’s a useful feature for those rainy weekends when there’s little else on, and the good stuff is all hidden away at ridiculous times and in unexpected places (Melvyn Bragg’s excellent The Adventure of English series, for example, languishing in the cultural desert of 10am on a Saturday morning on TV One — except when they decided to skip a week, right in the middle of the series, just for the hell of it… or was that just one of those TVNZ negative reality inversions?).
Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was the aforementioned Mark Steel Lectures — ‘Great Thinkers’ which is definitely the best thing on TV at the moment (Monday at 18:00 on the Arts Channel and repeated at various times during the week). The best thing apart from Huff, that is. But now you’re curious (go on, admit it), I think I shall deal to it in another post. That couch of mine doesn’t sag on its own, you know.
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