Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION
The best of the rash of humorous comments made about the United States presidential election fiasco was by an American television comic, at a stage last week when the public farce was proceeding apace in the Florida Supreme Court. He commented: “The good news is that neither George Bush nor Al Gore has become president. The bad news is that this situation cannot last forever.”
It was a line of wonderfully accurate satire. Watching the televised two-and-a-half-hour Supreme Court hearing was even better. How else but as virtuoso satire could you describe a chief justice’s opening comments in a matter of such historical resonance, in which his principal emphasis was on the appropriate use of the courtroom lavatories during a 10-minute recess planned for halfway through the arguments? How else could anyone describe the Alice in Wonderland-cum-Kafkaesque torrent of gobbledegook that ensued? Here was television at its utmost, a demonstration of the medium’s uncanny ability to reveal at close quarters what pitiful idiocy so often fuels high political and legal charabancs. Should we also forget the fact that of the seven judges sitting, no less than six were Democratic Party appointees. And there you were thinking that South African courts hold the copyright on dubious bench occupants. Old Quartus de Wet must be humming in his grave.
We saw the same revelatory television a couple of years ago in those courtroom visits where the English au pair, Louise Woodward, was tried on charges of having murdered a baby in her care. The legal process was nearly as bizarre as last week’s. Though with far less consequent an outcome, it showed what other media can never match. For all its looky-soundy-feely-tasty-smelly shortcomings, in coverage like this television is unbeatable. Radio comes near but is almost invariably more a matter for the mind, for detached consideration, for the stripping to essentials of the news. Telly gives you every grimace, every writhing hand, every nervous glance. Think back to the Hansie Cronje hearings.
I have been abroad these last five weeks and if I may borrow a phrase from the incomparable Max Beerbohm travelling observantly through Italy and France. During the course of these meanderings I passed through the Mediterranean town of Rapallo where Beerbohm died, which is why he’s been on my mind. I didn’t get to see much television and understood even less in the occasional glimpses in auberge rooms. But even on that most slender evidence I must confirm what a recent Spectator article had to say about Italian television being the worst in the whole wide world.
The worst thing is the sheer volume and verbosity of the thing. Most programmes seem to be either studio discussions or game shows adorned with ranks of bulbous and scantily dressed women and enjoyed at prodigiously high volume by the viewing audience. In search of a light bulb I was in a tiny shop in Sora where no less than three vast side-by-side television sets, tuned to three different stations, were competing with each other at ear-splitting levels. It was like a scene from hell with the humans screaming at each other to be heard. The same applied in several other venues, especially in the Italian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in lira, of course, a trillionaire and where even the questions were bellowed.
Back in Surrey to see, note with some interest, that there is a bitter row developing between programme makers and the commercial station Independent Television about the latter’s unilateral decision to insert three instead of two commercial breaks every hour in longer programmes. The programme makers are complaining that in order to accommodate this decision they will have to re-edit material so that the commercial breaks still occur at “natural places” in a story or documentary. In United Kingdom television they take the trouble to do this kind of thing, as opposed to what South African viewers have to tolerate: commercials thrown at them whenever it pleases the station.
Another pleasing aspect about UK television is the lack of intrusive station logos in most transmissions. The prevailing philosophy seems to be that viewers are generally intelligent enough to know which channel they are watching and don’t need continual reminding. As for the content warnings those dreary PG 13 triangles by means of which the precision of South African morality is maintained in England a pre-programme spoken warning is given along with a screened back-up and that’s it.
And yes, they’ve also long since grown out of leering continuity announcers.