Television
Going global
Ian Hislop The only television I watched this week was while killing time in a hotel room. For a couple of hours during which I could eas- ily have read a book or done the Telegraph crossword (most of it anyway), I just chan- nel-hopped in a rather moronic fashion. Since this was a large London hotel it natu- rally had a Japanese station, a German one, an Italian one and two Arabic ones. There was football on at least two of the domestic channels so the foreign ones looked marginally more interesting than our own. They were not as it happened.
The curious thing about watching foreign television is that despite not knowing the language there is never any difficulty in understanding what you are watching. Despite the cultural differences all the gen- res are the same as ours. There was a long and obviously lame sit- com on a middle-east network which starred a woman looking uncannily like Maureen Lipmann. The jokes were familiar too. At one point the husband went to see his doctor and guess what? The doctor was a woman! No wonder he buttoned his shirt back up and ran out of the surgery so fast! Meanwhile the wife went to see her doctor who looked exactly like Peter Butterworth. He embraced her for reasons which escaped me and then they went into a com- mercial break. I joined an Italian game show in which contestants had to make mayonnaise against the clock. In one cor- ner of the screen the allotted three minutes ticked away whilst men in full chefs outfits whipped eggs and poured olive oil into bowls. This was not, however, meant to be funny, as it would be here when Bruce Forsythe or Michael Barrymore is in charge. No, when the three minutes was up the serious looking Italian judges tasted the results, measured the depth of each mayon- naise with a ruler to record the level of fluffiness and then started the whole pro- cess again with more contestants. I turned over to see what was happening in Dubai. A man in full head-dress was introducing clips from Caspar-The Friendly Ghost. After each clip he said something which may have been wry but it was a bit difficult to tell under such an enormous moustache. He is probably the equivalent of Barry Norman over there but when he was replaced by a man in a hot air balloon singing Arab pop to a woman in the desert my attention wandered over to a German soap opera. Some fat old people shouted at each other in the street and then a young man and woman had an earnest discussion in their kitchen. They did not drink tea as they would have done in an English soap but the rest of the setting was easily identifi- able.
On the Japanese station a boy and a girl were wandering around a zoo eating crisps moodily. The girl tipped the whole packet into her mouth at one point and then car- ried on talking. She must have been very upset. Back on Italian television, there was another quiz show introduced by a well- endowed blonde. She was surrounded by other well-endowed blondes and together they welcomed some nerdy looking Italian men (there obviously are a few in Italy too). The blondes asked the questions and the winners took the money. On CNN Louis Farrakhan wore a bowtie and denied being a racist. Back on Sky, Bernard Manning wore a big smile and denied being a racist. `The Pakistanis love my show,' he told a phone caller. In the desert an Arab woman began wailing in a tent. Perhaps she had been watching television.
I later went to a press launch for the new series of Have I Got News For You. They showed some clips from the last series and Live TV, a cable channel run by the Mirror Group, actually filmed people watching. In my exclusive interview with the station I asked the presenter if this was not a bit des- perate. Filling up airtime with film of TV reviewers watching old clips of someone else's television show. Sadly this question will not be appearing on Live TV because their camera battery did not work and the whole conversation was lost. 'Never mind,' said the operator, 'I spent all day yesterday filming Page 3 girls waterskiing.'
The global communications revolution is pretty exciting so far.
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