All for one

First published in Column 8 on the 16^th Sept 1992

Struggling my way late on Sunday afternoon towards the deadline of writing a column on Monday morning, I was considering discussing deadlines, when a reader kindly informed me of the absurd presentation conjunction on all three television channels.

I promise this is the last time for a while (a fortnight at least) that I mention the word television in this column. Otherwise my columnistic colleague, Miles Synge, will wonder if I’m stealing his thunder.  

Anyone who wanted to watch something apart from rubgy on television between the hours of five and six on Sunday evening must have wondered if they were expected to put on a videotape. That’s right, Stanton, all three channels screened rubgy, or one of its variants.

And, believe it or not, those able to get Sky would have seen archive film on…rubgy. Good grief.

(For those who wonder why this strange word ‘rubgy’ occurs in this column, you’ll have to consult my computer; I think it’s incapable of writing the word correctly.)

And it wasn’t only this hour that was overloaded with uniform entertainment: Television One had shown sport since 2.00 – (four hours in all); Channel 2’s sport went for two hours; and TV3’s for three (appropriate, I guess).

Don’t television presenters talk to each other anymore? Don’t they check out what’s been shown on each other’s channel? As my reader said, here was a prime opportunity for at least one of the channels to show something different. (Even that gentlemanly sport, soccer, perhaps.)

Does this tripling-up happen because rubgy is cheap to produce on television? (More economical obviously than importing quality programmes from overseas.) Or is it true that television companies get paid large sums of money to show certain sports? Even that might be acceptable, up to a point, if there was variety. But we don’t see other sports anywhere near as much as rugby, mainly because those sports can’t afford the cost of being shown. Talk about cheapskate television!

I can see the television channels turning their viewers right off (which I suppose would be a change), and the video shops being saturated with customers. Either that, or else viewers will do what friends of mine mostly do: they record the quality programmes – which almost invariably are shown around midnight – and watch them the next evening, during the junk food television.

In the future television producers may find it easier to sell their material direct to the video outlets, where customers can really have a choice about what they want to watch.

Then with fewer viewers watching the prime time pap, the advertisers may have to rethink their priorities. Watching television may become a very non-U thing to do. In fact I wonder if that isn’t already happening. Television may join the cinema in becoming old hat.

And talking of old hat cinema, I see the Octagon movie theatre, where the stalls swept upwards towards the screen, has finally closed.

No wonder there are so many back problems amongst now middle-aged former film-goers. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have suffered a crick in the neck or an ache in the back from having to sit with my head at an acute angle for anything up to three hours – as occurred after arriving late at The Sound of Music, and finding that the only seats left were a bare few yards from the screen.

Let’s hope the new cinema complex will be built with the customers in mind; which is more than we seem to be able to hope for from the television moguls.  

 

 I used to visit an elderly neighbour until he died a couple of years ago: his television was apparently incapable of playing anything but rugby, I thought, until I visited him in a rest home and found that there the television was incapable of playing anything but horseracing.

It’s also interesting that my comment about television producers selling to video outlets (when they still existed) came true, to a degree, and now, of course, many minor films only ever appear on streaming channels, and thousands of hours of television shows of all sorts are available there too. We’ve gone from no choice to total choice.