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Television - the drug of the nation


I know I should talk about the environment, but its the broadcasting environment I’m thinking of.
There’s a Gerard Scarfe cartoon of John Logie Baird, the man who invented TV, sitting in front of a television set which vomits sewage all over him. “Oh John Logie Baird’, the cartoonist wrote, ‘ What have you done? How many of us, clutching the remote, have sat comatose before your vomiting Pandora’s box, being sprayed with dumbed-down crap?” Years ago this might have been dismissed as intellectual snobbery. Not any more.
Sea Week being the week thats in it, maybe we can speculate on whats gone wrong with the broadcasting climate; think of it ecologically. Nowadays TV is fuelled by euphemisms known as ‘Competition’ or the ‘Market’, or ‘Globalisation’. These are euphemisms for a narrow economic view of life known as Capitalism, whose beauty and symmetry, considered from afar, always earn my grudging respect.
I admire Capitalism like I admire the strength and beauty of a crocodile or a tiger, especially knowing that those beasts would not hesitate for a second before breaking my bones and eating me.
But approach it ecologically. The euphemistic Free Market’s impact on the ecology of broadcasting reminds me of the symmetry of a tropical rain forest where exotic flowers and birds and boa constrictors thrive in equilibrium - a boa constrictor can crush and swallow a cow as fast as multi-nationals can swallow a little island.
In the tropical rain forest there is equilibrium between life and death. Those who eat and are eaten are not confused by human illusions or scruples like ethics or justice or kindness or decency. Those ideas just don’t give pause to tigers or hyenas. The tropical ecosystem works smoothly like that - at least in theory, until acid rain and global warming start biting back.
The ecosystem of broadcasting is analogous in that there is a primal symmetry between TV and society. There are the winners on TV and the losers watching it, the smart guys talking smoothly and the inarticulate suckers watching open mouthed, the Big Brothers and the rejects. In a word, the consumers and the consumed.
Noel Coward said that TV is for being on, not for watching. I increasingly agree. It is, in the main, chewing gum for the eyes. But the chewing gum is increasingly spiked with toxic substances called sponsorship and commercials.
Think of people in pain; they need antihistamines or analgesics or aspirin or drugs to dull the pain.
TV, all TV, incites us to want things we don’t need and can’t actually afford - like the latest Nike shoes or killing machines called cars - but which we nevertheless buy. This causes cognitive dissonance in us which results in existential and economic angst which is a palpable form of pain.
TV is the main engine of persuasion to acquire consumer goods, regardless of the stress their acquisition or failure to do so, causes.
But, providentially TV is also the opiate, the distraction from the pain which it has had such a large part in creating. Thats what I call symmetry. Its a closed system, a one-stop shop. Its like the guilt that was once induced in us by Redemptorist preachers who then could supply us with the wonderful panacea of confession. A nice symmetry there , endless guilt and endless forgiveness. In the new Television land it is endless goodies, endless persuasion, endless need and endless consumption.

I’m not denying that Tv is also a kind of source of information. Soap operas are to us what taxi drivers are to travelling journalists - their main source of insight into whats going on in society. Thats why most Television executives have only the vaguest inkling of or interest in whats really going on at the lower end of the human feeding chain. Not surprising when TV’s main news diet is press releases from Government and fat cats. There’s no percentage in wandering around Darndale at night with a camera, recording what life is really like out there..
We are all drug addicts in one form or another. I drink too much and used smoke too much. How else could we bear life - and especially the prospect of death - in a post-religious society. Both are unimaginable situations from which we must distract ourselves - to death, usually.
The average child who was once us watches 18,000 murders on TV in his or her childhood. We learn schadenfreude very young in this civilization. I’m glad thats not me, we say of the victims. You might say that just as adults consume advertisements for slow motion hair and falsely shining teeth, children consume advertisements for murder. They become addicted to these exciting escapes from humdrum life. In the US some children get guns and express their addiction in practical terms, on their fellow schoolchildren. Young males watch horror movies on video and television as a rite of passage, to see if they can bear the terror. Some of them - actually 500 of them annually in this island - get fed up with the game and kill themselves. There is a symmetry there too.
Gay Byrne would have said - and indeed did say on radio many years ago (I heard him) - that TV does not affect people much. He especially thought that commercials did not influence people. Can you imagine such blind, blatant disingenuousness - an affectation which has been adopted by every TV executive in the world.? But even simpletons like George Dubya Bush and pragmatists like Mary Harney knew that we must consume more just to keep them and us in our multinational jobs and that TV is the main incitement to consumption. How is it that personalities like Byrne or Kenny or Eamon or Marion or Gerry or Joe or the rest of the litany of comfortable personalities never publicise that? And we have replaced the baloney of priests with their baloney? Why? Because most of our mammies and missuses and mistresses love them. Who dares say Ireland is not still a Matriarchy?*
The funny thing is that TV is exonerated from blame.
Society is in chaos, conventional wisdom says: but it is other people who are the drug addicts, the bad drivers, the crooked bankers and property speculators and estate agents, and TV just reflects this, is not to blame, is neutral, just tells it like it is. Why are we so tolerant towards this phenomenon? Part of the reason for the exoneration is that all of the well-heeled formative elements in our society need TV to get their smug ideas across, to get exposure for their clever evasions, There is a wonderful synchronicity between the blandness of presenters and guests, interviewers and interviewees, newsreaders and their cloned bulletins, weather people, soap operas, and the commercials - but the latter, the advertisements, are certainly the principal architects and driving forrce behind this blandness.
There are increasing attempts, as in contemporary Irish cinema, to counter this blandness of TV, this flight from reality, this elimination of memory. These attempts frequently and exclusively constitute the use of the words fuck, bollix and shite in every scene. They are the last refuge of middle-class scriptwriters
I envy tv-free houses. I read once that Neil Jordan’s father would’nt let TV in the house so the young fellow had to read books. Vincent Dowling tells me he kicked his TV set out 15 years ago. The greatest mistake I ever made was 20 years ago when my then new wife persuaded me to get a TV so that my first 4 children would not feel deprived when they came to stay with us for Summer and Easter and Christmas. I insisted that at least they turn down the sound on the commercials. I thus gave the commercials the status of forbidden fruit. As a result, two of those children occasionally made good money working on commercials. You can’t win. I give up. So did they, thankfully.
The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland has finally woken up to the problem of TV as a childrens drug. They are paying attention to the , paedophilia of the imagination which is child-targeted commercials. A lady in there has done excellent research on most of the literature pertaining to the phenomenon. Unfortunately, she tells me, she was intitially confined to reproducing industry-based research. This means the immense and worldwide resources of advertising being devoted to saying kids are not influenced by TV.commercials. This needs to be balanced by the views of ordinary citizens. If you want to do something about it, write to the BCI. Be the acid rain, the global warming of the television ecosystem. Bite back.
Unless you are too drugged to care anymore.

Bob Quinn, Clonmel, 19th OCT. 2003

*Post scriptum:
If feminisation is coherent enough to be an ideology it may be the only one – apart from capitalism – that has so far excaped total demonisation. This is no coincidence.
The female has traditionally been the shopper. When capitalism recently decided that consumerism was the most efficient expression of its viciousness, the gentle sex was the best prepared, the most adaptable, as well as being the more amenable and, dare one say it, the more guillible of the sexes.
Retail therapy having become a fashionable addiction, the male purse became inadequate and the female had to go out to work to support the deadly habit. Nominal economic equality and a total disregard for the limitations of natural resources facilitated the demise of the ‘hunter’ and the rise of the ‘gatherer’. Now the female is both hunter and gatherer.