Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse

by David Mitchell

  And then, when they succeed in getting attention, just like an overdomesticated dog who one day catches up with a rabbit, they won’t know what to do with it.

  Since I wrote this in 2010, no other new Shakespeare plays have been discovered and the revamped We Are the Champions seems to have got stuck in development.

  *

  In February 2009, a different broadcasting trend was getting on my nerves …

  Watching paint dry will presumably be among the attractions of Saatchi’s Best of British (working title), Charles Saatchi’s “nationwide search to discover the next generation of artistic talent”, to be broadcast on BBC2 this autumn.

  The aim is to use television to raise the profile and improve the accessibility of modern art, but it may end up using modern art to make people finally despair of television.

  I’m not entirely clear what the point is. The last generation of artistic talent managed to limp to prominence without the help of an accompanying TV series. Or maybe they didn’t and the real geniuses never even bought themselves an easel (or video camera, pickled sheep, lightbulb or bed) because TV never suggested it. Maybe the country will finally get the modern art it deserves. Can’t wait.

  These days, a television series is the must-have recruitment tool for any self-respecting profession: chefs, choirs, models, footballers, entrepreneurs, opera singers, pop stars, restaurateurs and novelty acts all get picked on TV. As the medium’s power and popularity wanes, the technology is being rejigged for other uses. Just as Roman temples were bastardised for Saxon hovels and the SS Great Eastern was sent to lay telegraph cables, so the analogue bandwidth is being sold off to mobile phone companies and half the BBC’s studios are being used for storage.

  And it’s patriotic, in the credit crunch, that the process by which the country’s diminishing job vacancies are filled should itself create so much employment for people in TV. But, as physics-denying executives always say: “In broadcasting, if you’re standing still, you’re moving backwards.”

  So the country’s development producers have been racking their brains to think of other careers that can be staffed using television shows. Here are just a few of the ideas currently being considered by broadcasters.

  Bankers

  You Can Bank on Me! is a collaboration between Channel 4 and HM Treasury. Alistair Darling has given us an unprecedented challenge: we’ve got just 16 weeks to run Northern Rock into the ground. We’re on a quest to find the next generation of ludicrously overpaid alpha males bent on bringing down civilisation with their fecklessness!

  Just when most bankers are repenting, resigning or both, we’ll scour the country’s estate agencies and lap-dancing clubs for their replacements.

  We’re looking for people with towering self-esteem and the morals of a virus but who, when the chips are down, behave like a frightened herd of sheep scampering towards a giant mincing machine because it’s been painted to look like grass.

  Members of the House of Lords

  Keeping Up A-Peer-Ances (working title) is where constitutional innovation meets interactive TV meets youth-u-tainment. BBC3 has challenged us to sweep aside the sticky-fingered dullards of our upper house and replace them with teenagers.

  Thanks to a hastily pushed-through amendment to the Parliament Act, we’ll be temporarily ennobling 500 16-year-olds and letting them loose on all but the most vital legislation.

  Watch the drug-addled, respect-averse cyber generation have their “wicked” way with the Lords Spiritual and Temporal’s powers of amendment and delay. This show will keep the 16–25 demographic away from the advertising-dependent channels which so badly need it!

  A girlfriend for Prince Harry

  Slappersearch 09 is an exciting new entertainment format coming to Sky. We’ll scour the country for the kind of publicity-hungry babe for whom attempting to sing a song, persuading a dog to dance or even going on Big Brother is a bit too much like hard work, but who doesn’t mind red hair or casual racism.

  Orifice Productions (makers of Pornlocution, the ratings-grabbing tits-and-diction strand on Bravo) want to find the next generation of feisty young lasses who dare to dream but can’t be arsed to do much else.

  The finale will feature footage of the winner having full sex with Prince Harry in a luxury Dubai hotel (pending Palace approval).

  IT consultants

  Have You Got IT? is a 43-part aspiromentary coming to BBC2 in the summer. Did you have a dream? Do you love to dance or sing or write poetry or do stand-up? Did it not work out?

  We want to find the next generation of people who’ve just realised that they’re going to have to get a proper job. We’ll penetrate into the very heart of the grubby flats of dreamers blessed with neither luck nor talent and persuade them to get into IT.

  We’ll be there to capture on camera the moment when the spotlight our contestants imagine they’re standing in is replaced by the flickering neon of a football-pitch-sized office just off the A1 crammed with humming servers.

  A medium-sized part in a touring production of Romeo and Juliet

  ITV1’s Britain’s Next Top Benvolio is an unrivalled opportunity for the Royal Touring Theatre to drum up interest in what many consider to be Shakespeare’s most predictable play.

  Ruth Madoc, who is also playing the nurse, will head the judging panel as we scour the country for the next generation of budding thespians who for whatever reason haven’t bothered to try and become actors by any of the conventional routes.

  But only one of them will get to say “We shall not ’scape a brawl!” at the Swan, High Wycombe!

  Director-General of the BBC

  First Rule of Holes: Stop D-Ging! is an innovative format ready to launch on BBC1 whenever Mark Thompson finally resigns. We’ll scour the country for the next generation of hand-wringing functionaries willing to sizzle on the barbie of the rightwing press’s hate.

  “Like a king prawn, with these guys it’s their very spinelessness that makes them palatable to predators,” jokes Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the judges.

  In the last episode, the winner will be whoever makes the best job of explaining why an episode of Songs of Praise in which Frankie Boyle and John Sergeant spit-roast a nun was cleared for a repeat on CBeebies.

  A four-part Charles Saatchi-fronted modern art show, retitled School of Saatchi, was subsequently broadcast on BBC2 in November–December2009. I didn’t watch it. Saatchi has since found other ways of remaining in the public eye.

  *

  One of my least favourite programmes of the 1980s was Why Don’t You [Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead]? I watched it anyway, of course. It was on.

  It was presented by gangs of children with different regional accents, which I suppose was meant to make it feel more inclusive. It didn’t work on me. I found the accents alienating. They made me worry that those were the sort of children who would despise me and call me a “posh twat”, a jibe my parents worked hard to earn the bare minimum to qualify me for. They scrimped and saved to buy me just enough privilege to make me contemptible.

  And the thing I did have in common with the presenters – that I, too, was a child – just made me think: “How’d they get that? Why can’t I be on TV maddening them?” Sometimes things work out in the end.

  The content of the show was the familiar series of tedious tasks that required items of stationery that I never possessed or physical activities that I was too weedy for. But my main beef with it was its title. That was the metaphorical photo of a cancerous lung on the cigarette packet of my viewing pleasure.

  I was already aware that my predilection for watching hours of television every day was a terrible failing. The concerted censure of every authority figure left me in no doubt of what a betrayal of the opportunities of childhood that was. I should have been reading books or getting fresh air, bicycling around in crime-solving gangs and fishing in streams. Our bit of suburban Oxford seemed a bit short on streams or
caves full of forgers, but then I’d never really looked.

  Adults’ sentences beginning “When I was your age …” never ended with “I’d have given my eye teeth to be left alone to watch Knight Rider, so you go for it, lad!” What I was doing was an insult to children of the past and of fiction; to Coral Island and evacuees and a ha’p’orth of gobstoppers. I should have been going to Cubs or training for swimming badges. But most worryingly, I was putting my imagination in jeopardy. Because, as surely as carrots help you see in the dark and that you’ll regret giving up the piano when you’re older, television rots the imagination.

  You don’t have to imagine Star Trek – the aliens and lasers and spaceships are all on the screen in front of you. There are no gaps for your mind to fill – the art department has already plugged them with chipboard and silver paint. So reading, running around the garden, riding a bicycle or, most terrifyingly, interacting with new people are important activities that strengthen the ideas-generating parts of the brain that otherwise atrophy under the influence of TV.

  “Get used to these more gruelling and effort-requiring forms of fun and you’ll build the mental equipment for a fuller life,” was the argument. A bit like the principle by which we’re weaned on to alcohol: “It may not taste as good as Coke now, but you wait – oh, you just wait.” Sadly, the latter argument was the only one I had the imagination for.

  But among the advantages of becoming an adult are that people stop admonishing you and you’re allowed the illusion of vindication about your childish choices. “I spent most of the 80s watching TV and it never did me any harm,” I can safely say, knowing that it’s an experiment with no control. There’s no other David Mitchell walking around who, having eschewed TV, has an imagination unstunted by assiduously following the plot of Dynasty. Unless it’s that pesky novelist.

  So it came as a shock when Jeremy Paxman stormed into the living room during Doctor Who and started hoovering under my legs and telling me to go outside. I protested that I’d finished my work, but he said it was a lovely day and that he’d give me 2p for every mare’s tail I dug up.

  I’m speaking metaphorically (a medical miracle, my old English teacher would say, after what all those episodes of The A-Team did to my brain). In a talk at the Hay Festival, Paxman called the public a “bunch of barbarians” because watching TV is our favourite leisure activity. He thinks we should go to art galleries instead.

  I don’t mind that he’s biting the hand that feeds him. A healthy disdain for that hand is an attractive quality, I’ve always thought – that’s probably why I’m more of a cat than a dog person. But has he considered what it signifies that it’s the television personality Jeremy Paxman – a highly respected journalist, certainly, but hardly a potential Nobel Prize winner – who has the prominence to make this unreconstructed appeal on behalf of the highbrow?

  It means that he’s what counts as highbrow now, a high-rent newsreader who’s done a few books as TV spin-offs, the most recent of which he got another writer to finish for him. The fact that the likes of him are the focus of literary festivals is an index of how completely the cause he’s arguing for is lost.

  I don’t rejoice in that. But as someone who can’t spend more than a few minutes in an art gallery without developing a desire for a cup of tea and a sit down as all-consuming as a sudden realisation of diarrhoea, and who often insists on watching episodes of Cash in the Attic to their three-figure-sum-generating conclusions, it would be hypocritical of me to echo his moans. And I’m a beneficiary of dumbing down, too. Regurgitate half-remembered facts from your A-level syllabus on a panel show, I’ve found, and you’ll get lumped in with the learned.

  It’s unkind to kick TV at the moment. It may still be our favourite leisure activity, but new competitors are threatening its solvency. Eschewing television for reasons of arty respectability is no longer a choice that can be made with confidence that the medium will nevertheless prosper. Even the most bookish may soon wonder whether they’d be better off with the devil they know.

  The barbarians are switching off, but a glance at YouTube confirms that they’re not necessarily doing anything less boring instead.

  *

  Daytime television on BBC1 has a new slogan: “Make the most of your day.” Is this capitulation? Is daytime TV conceding its addictive, time-killing, life-sapping effect and exhorting us to escape while we still can? Are the forces of evil finally losing heart, like Darth Vader turning on the Emperor to save his son or O’Brien repenting tragically too late of the soap-based booby trap she’d laid for her mistress? (And if you haven’t watched either Return of the Jedi or Downton Abbey, then I’m bang out of cultural references that you’re going to get.)

  No. The BBC is actually claiming that watching daytime TV constitutes making the most of your day. The slogan is preceded by an exciting-looking montage of excerpts from shows. They went past in a blur so I’m not sure what they were, but they exuded an overwhelming sense of significance: a clip from Doctors where someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness; a heartbreakingly botched dormer window from Cowboy Trap; the rescue of a malnourished spaniel from Animal 24:7; a bit of Land Girls where someone gets cross, that sort of thing. “Don’t touch that remote,” it’s imploring. “Don’t change channel or get off your arse. No need to move because this, watching this, is making the most of your day. Do not leave the room! It’s Bargain Hunt in a minute! This is life lived to the full.”

  The BBC Trust disagrees. In its review of all aspects of the corporation’s output, it picked out daytime as the weakest link and pointless – and that’s just a snippet from the schedule. It called for shows that are less “formulaic and derivative”. It wants to put a stop to the endless footage of people buying and selling antiques and houses.

  This makes me uneasy. I work from home a lot and so I’m a major user of daytime TV. I use it to waste time in a very specific way – to squander short chunks of it. I’m supposed to be working, I can’t face it, I wander round the house, I put the kettle on, I turn on the TV, it engages me for a few minutes, then gradually I lose interest and return to my computer, maybe do a bit of work – writing this sentence, for example – then pop back to the kettle and/or television. I’m going there now. Back in a minute.

  I’m back. A professional couple from Peterborough who are looking to relocate to somewhere with more space for the husband’s motorbike collection didn’t like house number two because it was too close to a noisy road. The host suggested double-glazing. I wandered away and put some toast on.

  Texturally, daytime TV is a delicate and remarkable thing. The morning schedule on BBC1 is a series of programmes that, while apparently almost unbelievably bland, becomes more intriguing and varied the closer one looks, like a patchwork of a thousand different beiges, yet retains the key attribute of being too boring to watch for more than 20 minutes at a stretch. The toast has popped.

  Well, that’s the last of the good jam. A mother and daughter from Plymouth just sold a decanter for a £19 loss, but then it didn’t have its own stopper. The next lot was a 1950s Mickey Mouse ashtray, so I went for a look at Twitter.

  BBC Daytime is a groundbreaking experiment into how much people can be induced to take a passing interest in activities that don’t concern them. There’s a programme about a company that specialises in finding the relatives of people who have died intestate. It simply follows their working day: “Gladys died in St Thomas’s nursing home in 2006, leaving £82,000 from the sale of her house. The nurses at the home say she often spoke of a half-sister, Gwen, who died of pneumonia during the three-day week. But did Gwen ever marry and have children? Investigator Peter Edwards goes to Preston records office to find out.” Then they film the guy setting his satnav.

  There’s a programme in which people who want to move house are shown three hastily chosen properties, pick one and are then allowed to “try before they buy”. This means they sit in it for part of an afternoon. They get the full experience of residence bu
t not for quite long enough to need the loo. At the end, they’re asked if they’re going to buy the house, and they always – in my experience absolutely always – say no.

  There’s my personal favourite, Homes Under the Hammer, where the production company has just set up a video camera at a property auction and sent presenters to stalk the successful buyers. And there are three different antique-purveying shows: one where the antiques are bought and sold in the same show; one where an expert trawls someone’s attic for valuables in order to raise them money for the scuba holiday of their dreams; and one which is basically a more mercenary version of Antiques Roadshow with worse antiques. The subtle distinctions between these formats would be lost on those with proper jobs but are as apparent to me as different types of snow to an Inuit.

  Just made a tea and watched an RSPCA man give a woman a stern talking to for not giving her horse the right jabs. He’ll be checking up again in six months.

  I need programmes like these, shows during which it is completely unnecessary to think. Of course, I’ve got better things to watch – there’s a cellophane-wrapped box set of The Sopranos on the shelf above my TV that’s been gathering dust for three years – but they’re no good to me. I need brief distractions that are easy to be distracted from. If I unwrapped a DVD, it would be like cracking open the scotch – I might as well file for bankruptcy.

  I know daytime TV isn’t primarily provided as brain massage for lazy comedy writers, but I wonder how many of its regular viewers are as displeased with it as the BBC Trust? My suspicion is that those trustees don’t usually watch it; they’re not familiar with the genre. They’re comparing it to prime-time programming, which people are perfectly able to watch during the daytime instead – on DVD, cable repeat, iPlayer or Sky/Virgin/Freeview Plus. Daytime pap has never been so avoidable. If it’s still getting viewers, isn’t that a sign that it’s not just feckless freelancers who are in the market for inconsequential television?