world of relentless, churning shod. Some day a real rain’s going to come and wash the scum off the screens. Until then, sit back and gawp in slack-jawed indifference as television slowly disappears up a lap dancer’s bottom. In close-up. To the echoing strains of ‘Roll With It’.
The upshot is we’ve become hopelessly desensitised – but it’s not just the box that’s to blame. Consider the impact of technology. The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people with Internet connections in the workplace, enabling office-bound tragi-bores to access and distribute stomach-churning muck with tiresome ease and gusto. Once you’ve got accustomed to having your attention regularly drawn to the kind of extreme imagery previously reserved for the racier shop windows of Amsterdam, all pornography rapidly becomes a crashing bore, no matter how bizarre. Hey, look – an MPEG clip of a circus clown sodomising a wolf on the deck of a Mississippi steamboat. Yawwwwn. Seen it before. Seen it twice. Rather watch a bit more Microsoft Excel, thanks.
So, faced with competition from a bottomless technological smutweb on one hand, and a range of post-ironic pornorific TV programming on the other, what chance does Eurotrash have? Not much. To compete in the current climate it needs to grow harsher, less affectionate, more ruthless. Scrap the ‘Euro’ prefix; have the show re-christened just ‘Trash’. Ditch the wacky German fetish bars and Dutch pot-smoking contests; shoot each edition in the seediest quarter of Bangkok. Throw out the irony and humour; exchange it for eerie, misplaced fascination. Replace Antoine with a naked amputee who sits on a barbed-wire toilet seat repeatedly threatening to murder members of the audience, reading their addresses out on air and nonchalantly toying with a bloodied switchblade. Broadcast the entire show in 3D, pumping each and every image directly into the viewer’s cerebellum via a length of magicspacewire connected to the Internet. Sorry, Rapido, but that’s it. That’s the only way to restore the outrage.
That’s how low we’ve all sunk. It’s either that or you have to kill the whole thing off. Who’d have thought it? Sleazy, scampish little Eurotrash – slowly rendered far too innocent to survive. These are dark days, readers. Dark days.
Now wash your hands.
Live and Dangerous [20 July 2000]
Heard of screen burn? It used to affect computer monitors. If you used a particular program a lot, some of its prevailing visual features – the menu bar, for instance – would, over time, become permanently etched onto the screen, remaining faintly visible for evermore. Screensavers were invented to prevent this kind of damage, hence their name.
Fascinating stuff. The point is this: if a similar phenomenon afflicted regular TV screens, you could be forgiven for expecting to find your set indelibly stained with Carol Vorderman. Not that you’d notice the change: it feels like she’s permanently onscreen anyway. But she isn’t the worst offender. In fact, in a list of the most-seen presenters on television in the latest edition of industry magazine Broadcast , Vorderman finishes fourth. You’re far more likely to wind up with Richard Madeley’s face burnt across your Trinitron, like some nightmarish twenty-first-century Turin Shroud: he and wife Judy Finnegan squat proudly at the top of the league. The charts were calculated according to ‘exposure factor’: the time in minutes they are seen by an ‘average’ viewer in one week. Richard and Judy win with 14.06 minutes for This Morning .
The rest of the list contains several surprises, such as the news that the Antiques Roadshow ’s Hugh Scully (number 19 on the overall list) enjoys more exposure than Johnny Vaughan and Lisa Tarbuck (languishing at number 24, thanks largely to the state of The Big Breakfast ’s ratings, currently at art-house cinema levels). There’s also the non-appearance of
The upshot is we’ve become hopelessly desensitised – but it’s not just the box that’s to blame. Consider the impact of technology. The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people with Internet connections in the workplace, enabling office-bound tragi-bores to access and distribute stomach-churning muck with tiresome ease and gusto. Once you’ve got accustomed to having your attention regularly drawn to the kind of extreme imagery previously reserved for the racier shop windows of Amsterdam, all pornography rapidly becomes a crashing bore, no matter how bizarre. Hey, look – an MPEG clip of a circus clown sodomising a wolf on the deck of a Mississippi steamboat. Yawwwwn. Seen it before. Seen it twice. Rather watch a bit more Microsoft Excel, thanks.
So, faced with competition from a bottomless technological smutweb on one hand, and a range of post-ironic pornorific TV programming on the other, what chance does Eurotrash have? Not much. To compete in the current climate it needs to grow harsher, less affectionate, more ruthless. Scrap the ‘Euro’ prefix; have the show re-christened just ‘Trash’. Ditch the wacky German fetish bars and Dutch pot-smoking contests; shoot each edition in the seediest quarter of Bangkok. Throw out the irony and humour; exchange it for eerie, misplaced fascination. Replace Antoine with a naked amputee who sits on a barbed-wire toilet seat repeatedly threatening to murder members of the audience, reading their addresses out on air and nonchalantly toying with a bloodied switchblade. Broadcast the entire show in 3D, pumping each and every image directly into the viewer’s cerebellum via a length of magicspacewire connected to the Internet. Sorry, Rapido, but that’s it. That’s the only way to restore the outrage.
That’s how low we’ve all sunk. It’s either that or you have to kill the whole thing off. Who’d have thought it? Sleazy, scampish little Eurotrash – slowly rendered far too innocent to survive. These are dark days, readers. Dark days.
Now wash your hands.
Live and Dangerous [20 July 2000]
Heard of screen burn? It used to affect computer monitors. If you used a particular program a lot, some of its prevailing visual features – the menu bar, for instance – would, over time, become permanently etched onto the screen, remaining faintly visible for evermore. Screensavers were invented to prevent this kind of damage, hence their name.
Fascinating stuff. The point is this: if a similar phenomenon afflicted regular TV screens, you could be forgiven for expecting to find your set indelibly stained with Carol Vorderman. Not that you’d notice the change: it feels like she’s permanently onscreen anyway. But she isn’t the worst offender. In fact, in a list of the most-seen presenters on television in the latest edition of industry magazine Broadcast , Vorderman finishes fourth. You’re far more likely to wind up with Richard Madeley’s face burnt across your Trinitron, like some nightmarish twenty-first-century Turin Shroud: he and wife Judy Finnegan squat proudly at the top of the league. The charts were calculated according to ‘exposure factor’: the time in minutes they are seen by an ‘average’ viewer in one week. Richard and Judy win with 14.06 minutes for This Morning .
The rest of the list contains several surprises, such as the news that the Antiques Roadshow ’s Hugh Scully (number 19 on the overall list) enjoys more exposure than Johnny Vaughan and Lisa Tarbuck (languishing at number 24, thanks largely to the state of The Big Breakfast ’s ratings, currently at art-house cinema levels). There’s also the non-appearance of
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