Posts tagged BBC4
Victim of Formality
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For those who have not seen the show – if, like me, you watch American Idol and know you must choose one reality show per genre and avoid all others for fear of incurring irreparable brain damage – The Voice is a “blind audition” show. Four dubious stars – Christina Aguilera, Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Green – imperiously listen to ugly people sing, while sitting in gigantic red Starship Enterprise chairs with their backs turned.
They then meet the uggos and marvel, then fight over them in order to form winning teams in a super-positive version of the age-old sadism that is choosing sides for gym class.
I remember early promos for the shows that advanced the idea, via Levine, that, before music videos, “in the 1970s” there were a lot of “sketchy-looking people [who] had gorgeous voices.”
Levine’s logic is, of course, completely warped. In the 1970s, there were album covers, fan magazines and concerts. The Beatles did very well with female fans, despite the infrequent visuals; Elvis Presley never shot a video in his life but women are still throwing their panties at the Meditation Garden in Graceland.
Okay, these stars are good-looking, but the “sketchy-looking” people still often succeed: Is The Voice trying to suggest that the well-upholstered Cee Lo is doing well because of his good looks?
Are we so star-sick that Cee Lo gets a pass? - The Globe and Mail
Having spent many an hour this year watching 1976 episodes Top of the Pops on BBC4 I can assure you that there were indeed many “uggos” back then. Of course there is so much more wrong with this article.
I tried to watch BBC4’s ‘Ceramics: A Fragile History’ today on iPlayer, mainly out of guilt for having downloaded it as a joke. Not one of BBC4’s better productions I have to say—a familiar narrator talking over school film strips, including some twentieth-century footage presented as evidence of Victorian working conditions (I suppose the North all looks the same from London?). Also a few talking heads reciting the same two or three points of what I suppose I’m to assume is orthodox ceramic theory—variations on fixity.
Parts were good (including, of course, Lucy Worsley), but the takeaway from episode 1 was that the English advanced through the immigration of foreign artists, or reverse-engineering foreign methods. Occasionally an expert proclaimed that English artisans had “caught up”. But then why am I supposed to care about English backwardness? I’d really rather learn about Delftware, not English Delftware.
The worst part is that, having made it through the first episode, iPlayer announced that it had meanwhile deleted episode 2, which was actually relevant to my interests, being about Stoke-on-Trent, the industrial revolution, and the rise and fall of an Imperial business. Well, at least I now know that medieval pottery was all low quality, and brown.
(Foot and Mouth no. 5, Paul Scott, via Epoch Times).
