Guilt free telly
I'm not goiing to get involved in this whole celebrity big brother nonsense. Frankly I've never heard of half the people in it, I don't know why I should care what they say to each other. I loved the first Big Brother series years ago because I thought it was so hilariously pointless.
When it starts to be about just churning out shock and intrigue as if this very human interaction was a commodity that could just be traded it loses that innocent irrelevance and becomes a horrible metaphor for something. Not sure what though.
At any rate, there's an amusing angle on this that made me chuckle on the tube this morning. There's obviously been some sort of concerted campaign amongst certain members of the Indian population in the UK to stoke up outrage at the treatment of this Bollywood star by some other pretty irrelevant people. Not having seen any of the show I've no idea of the justice or otherwise of their stance, but I do know someone needs to tell them that at least one of their campaign ploys is almost as big a waste of time as the show itself.
TV ratings are calculated by monitoring a rolling sample of households (I think it's about 40,000 houses) through a black box on their telly. So if you're going to organise a boycott of a tv program to hit their ratings and try to force them to pull it, if you ain't one of those 40,000 your determined non-watching of the show will have precisely no effect on the decisions of broadcasters or advertisers.
We used to have one of those boxes. You get M&S vouchers in return, and of some reason my mum thought this was a reasonable return on the investment of the phenomenal faff of having to enter in what channel you were watching every time you tuned in. I used to exact my revenge by logging myself in as watching the History channel and going off to read the papers in the other room or going out shopping. If enough people did that, we'd have nothing but cheap re-enactments of the building of Tutankhamun's tomb with mystical music and a deep voice-over on every channel for ever. It would be hilarious.
I no longer have a telly.
When it starts to be about just churning out shock and intrigue as if this very human interaction was a commodity that could just be traded it loses that innocent irrelevance and becomes a horrible metaphor for something. Not sure what though.
At any rate, there's an amusing angle on this that made me chuckle on the tube this morning. There's obviously been some sort of concerted campaign amongst certain members of the Indian population in the UK to stoke up outrage at the treatment of this Bollywood star by some other pretty irrelevant people. Not having seen any of the show I've no idea of the justice or otherwise of their stance, but I do know someone needs to tell them that at least one of their campaign ploys is almost as big a waste of time as the show itself.
TV ratings are calculated by monitoring a rolling sample of households (I think it's about 40,000 houses) through a black box on their telly. So if you're going to organise a boycott of a tv program to hit their ratings and try to force them to pull it, if you ain't one of those 40,000 your determined non-watching of the show will have precisely no effect on the decisions of broadcasters or advertisers.
We used to have one of those boxes. You get M&S vouchers in return, and of some reason my mum thought this was a reasonable return on the investment of the phenomenal faff of having to enter in what channel you were watching every time you tuned in. I used to exact my revenge by logging myself in as watching the History channel and going off to read the papers in the other room or going out shopping. If enough people did that, we'd have nothing but cheap re-enactments of the building of Tutankhamun's tomb with mystical music and a deep voice-over on every channel for ever. It would be hilarious.
I no longer have a telly.
posted by Pickles @ 7:49 pm
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