I have earned the right to shout at my television
Bryan Forbes, the great British film-maker, is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more: today's television is rubbish, especially the brainless music My wife tells me that my present state reminds her of the famous Thurber cartoon of a woman crouched on top of a wardrobe with the watching man captioned as saying: 'For ten years I've known peace with you, Mildred, and now you say you're going mad.' If you substitute the genders, and the fact we have been together more than ten years, my wife is right: I used to be such a benign, adorable character and now, apparently, I have developed into a cantankerous old man who shouts at the television every night. Yes, let me anticipate the inevitable reaction: of course I could switch off, but I feel I have paid my dues in licence fees over the decades and I am now entitled to my madness.
It isn't just the endless reality shows that have driven me into the abyss — although I do find participants being routinely humiliated utterly repellent — it is the way in which all the channels now treat us as morons. I mean, come on, as Joan Rivers says, let's be serious. For example, to contend that nobody, but nobody, concerned knew that the phone-in contests were devised to produce astronomical profits carries as much conviction as the commandant of Auschwitz saying he had no idea why the gas bills were so high. Should that analogy be taken as offensive by the PC brigade, it is because I believe that everything now happening to us has a political motivation designed to further erode our ability to think for ourselves. In the ratings war the first casualty is always truth. We are being whitewashed and brainwashed, folks.
In my list of television hates I include that survivor from Blackadder who endlessly digs up half of England and discovers nothing more than the broken rim of a Stone Age piss pot, repeats of repeats, celebrity chefs who make snail ice-cream or eat fat-saturated midnight snacks in satin pyjamas, those poor demented women who submit to complete face and body makeovers in a matter of hours and emerge looking like the bride of Dracula, the dandy decorator with the fluffy shirt cuffs who turns ordinary suburban rooms into Victorian brothels, the two fashion gurus who do a lot of rather disturbing breast-squeezing, fatuous TV shows about fatuous TV shows, plus any programme featuring couples with the tragic urge to buy and run a B&B in Transylvania. Jeremy Paxman knows what I am talking about and recently listed some asinine examples to the chairman of the BBC Trust. I am awaiting some company to come up with the 100 best scenes of people vomiting. Watch this space.
But, in addition to this catholic list, my artistic venom is reserved for the wall-to-wall music that now accompanies every news item, all trailers and channel identification logos (remember the weird red mob standing in a swamp practising shadow boxing? Others now wrestle with kites or else fit a piece of a plastic moon into place. Is there no end to their costly ingenuity?) Intrusive music blots out sections of the Dragons' Den, obliterates the dialogue in most dramas and irritates the hell out of anybody trying to follow a historical documentary. Much of it isn't real music, just whooshing sounds manufactured on a synthesiser. We all know it is a given that the moment the commercial break comes around some nameless boffin turns up the volume beyond the threshold of pain, but my finely tuned rage is directed at the sheer incompetence of those who churn out much of our daily television fare. In musical terms few seem to have learnt their craft. I can claim to know what I'm talking about, having supervised the editing stages of some 50 feature films in my career. We used to take time and infinite care to get the balance right between dialogue and music in the final dubbing sessions (dubbing being the technical term for the process whereby all the sound tracks — dialogue, effects and music — are married together). During this process we used to have a few standard jokes during our slavish efforts to achieve the best possible result — like, 'Kill that, I can hear a seagull out of sight,' or 'Give me the effect of grass growing there.' It may sound nonsense but the object was for the engineers at the control desk to produce a finished print that did maximum justice to the co-operative effort that had gone into the shooting of the film I worked with some great and knowledgeable composers like Sir Malcolm Arnold, Muir Matheson, Francis Lai, Michael Lewis and, most notably, John Barry, with whom I enjoyed a collaboration over six films All of them knew instinctively that music was the final emotional ingredient complementing the visuals and that it must not fight with or render unintelligible the dialogue being spoken. If music is so intrusive that you lose the thread of the plot, then it is an exercise in futility. Take a look at some of the old films and compare them with contemporary television dramas. Study the brilliance of Anton Karas's zither score for Carol Reed's The Third Man, which made memorable every nuance of that landmark film, and then switch to the mindless cacophony that often spoils sections of a good series such as Spooks; the performances of the excellent cast are drastically reduced because the added music bears little or no relation to their actions on screen, or else obliterates their speech. When just mindless music is played at such high levels it betrays the fact that the programme-makers are unsure of themselves, terrified our concentration might lapse. Compare this with any of David Attenborough's magnificent wildlife documentaries, all of which rely on his isolated, erudite, often necessarily whispered commentaries spoken without the addition of some pointless jingle lifted off the shelf. They are an object lesson in professionalism.
Next time you tune into the BBC's News At Ten or Newsnight, remark how the opening soundbites are given the full ghetto-blaster treatment. Why? Who decided we viewers are such pathetic couch potatoes that we cannot receive the news without the addition of unrelated sounds more suited to a Hammer horror movie being added?
At a time when both the BBC and the ITV networks are in denial about the declining standards on offer to us, they might with advantage lose some of the self-satisfaction that pervades their outputs. Television today seems more and more concerned with dumbing down than with taking a long hard look at its ever-increasing shortcomings and might, with advantage to us all, resist eating its own entrails.
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