From me and the rest of the GMT language. This programme contains
some strong language. With every passing second, each of these
unsuspecting humanoids crawls one sixtieth of a minute closer to
coffin o'clock. As we make the journey from the cradle to be grave
we'll make and lose countless friends along the way, but one
companion who will be by our side throughout is Mr Terry Television
who has been there for us holding our brain's hand through each
increasingly shaky footfall. But television doesn't seem to like us,
whatever age we are. Whether it's painting young people as tearaway
yobs... How does it make you feel when you see your face on the front
page of the Birmingham Mail, cast as a yob? I am a yob. Or old people
as hilarious irrelevances. Little wonder we have come to view ageing
as a sign of incompetence. To what extent do you think old people have
failed? Probably to quite a large extent. Yeah. This week, how TV
ruined your life by ruining each individual stage of your life.
This is the top-secret research facility where TV executives,
marketing experts and psychopaths attempt to discover what makes the
different age groups tick. Television takes the business of
targeting different age groups very seriously, and it's a process that
begins early on from the moment when you first emerge blinking and
shrieking from the womb. Childbirth is a miracle, albeit
perhaps the most visually repugnant miracle it's possible to imagine a
short of watching a horse shitting a wheelbarrow. But nevertheless,
people seem fond of these gurgling semi-humanoid gumps. While there
are some bespoke programmes for babies, presumably few sane adults
consider them worthwhile viewing. There are shows like the twee Baby
Einstein series, a set of quasi- instructive montages of colours and
puppets and shapes which eager young parents buy and play to their
offspring in the hope this will somehow boost the child's intellect,
although I'd say in educational terms it's probably about as
effective as rubbing a dictionary on your baby's head. But if babies
don't use TV, TV is only happy to use babies as wickle sales people.
# Been around the world. # Seen so many pretty girls.
# But I still get overwhelmed. # When I look in your eyes.
Wow, he really is inordinately pleased to have abducted that baby.
Yes, babies are often cynically employed to help shift products
they can't even use. Now, if I transplanted a baby's head on to a
loaf of bread in a bid to improve sales, people would call me a
monster, but apparently it's just fine when an international
organisation digitally transplants babies' heads on to CGI bodies in
order to flog bottles of water. To be fair, that is quite cute -
albeit despicable. As babies get older and even more
bothersome they mutate into children, who are well catered for
by television with thousands of entertainment vehicles at their
disposal. They are also used in adverts as visual shorthand for
innocence and heritage. It's at this point TV starts sorting the
flesh blobs into easily manageable categories, boys and girls. So boys
are assailed by short sales pitches promoting mildness, devious
violence... All right, partner, freeze! Here's how the quick
shooter hat works. Just press this secret button right here and a
replica of an authentic Western pistol pops out and fires.
And extended sales pitches full of fantasy monsters and fighting and
lasers and explosions. While girls are bombarded with eerie adverts
for nightmarish dolls... Look who's come to your house to stay, a pal
you can play with all day long. She's Patti Playpal, a big doll,
big as a three-year-old. And Patti's real as life.
And adverts which should fuel that future image new roses. # Beautiful
Chrissie has beautiful hair that grows. She has beautiful hair! She
has beautiful eyes! She has beautiful clothes!
And the moment they mature to tweenhood, hideous propaganda films
about Miley Cyrus. The pioneering queen of tween role-
models is Hannah Montana, a wisecracking warbling smart-ass
played by Miley Cyrus, who's perhaps the only convincing
argument I've ever seen for China's unofficial policy of discarding
female infants at birth. Hannah Montana features a colour palette
so garish, watching it feels like being stabbed in the eye with a
sharpened lollipop, and a cast who seem to communicate exclusively via
irritating sounds. Say what?! what?! And that's all freaky-
freaky-freaky fresh. Suppose that counts as naturalistic dialogue if
you grew up in Little Yelping on the Shriek. Despite looking young
enough to have gnawed through her own umbilical cord shortly before
each scene, Hannah herself leaves a surprisingly adult life, especially
with boys, with whom she has a chaste but surprisingly confusing
relationship. I'm going to tell you something that I've never told
anyone before. Please don't have a hairy back, please don't have a
hairy back! Urgh. Usually if a 13 year-old's
worried her lover might have a hairy back, it's because she's been
trafficked. After tweens come teenagers.
Teenagers are by their very nature a sulky, arrogant group consisting
of nothing but grease, pus, hormones, hair gel and obstinance,
whose chief role in society is to scoff at absolutely everyone else.
There used to be so few programmes aimed at teens that merely spotting
one on screen was a novelty. When they did appear, they were
routinely portrayed as confused, alienated loners with silly dress-
sense. Teddy boys, I don't like them at all. I was going to the
chemist the other day for medicine for my children. It was a rather
deserted street and there was about six of them coming along, and they
thought they'd have a go at me. But I singled out the ringleader and I
gave him a real good punching on the nose.
Oh, well, let's hope you beat some civility into him.
Either that or they were irredeemable tearaway yobbo gangs
terrorising the good people of Britain and their cats.
What sort of things do you do? Killing cats. Knocking mopeds,
knocking booze out of the pavilion. Getting chased. Killing cats.
likes getting chased a lot by blokes and all that, just for a
laugh. Killing cats. By the late 1970s, teenagers were
so hopelessly out of control, desperate measures were called for
in the shape of the BBC's Community Programmes Unit. The Community
Programmes Unit had had a brainwave. Why not give teenagers aged between
16 and 20 a 45 minute show of their very own, and let them decide the
content? It couldn't possibly fail, unless it inevitably did.
Hello, this is Something Else from Manchester. And for anyone who
doesn't know just what they're in for, I'd better explain.
Something Else was a painfully right-on affair from the very
beginning, awkwardly mixing live punk performances with stilted
political debate. In the studio we've got The Clash
and Jo Lester, MP for Eton and Slough. Do you think there's going
to be a total disinterest in politics in the future? I don't
know, maybe I'll grow up to be Prime Minister.
There were also embarrassing folk songs from shy, earnest types.
I come to London, I feel a bit distressed, because it seems rather
impersonal and unfriendly. Oh, yeah? Try visiting Darfur, I'm
sure you'd get on well there. I've written a song which seems
relevant to that, it's called, Who Am I?
Go on, then, spit it out. # Who am # Who am I?
# Another day, another futile cry. # Who am I?
It was also defiantly and, in fact, boringly anti-establishment, with
all authoritarian figures coming in for a rather unfair going over.
Constable, why do you pick on young people? Why do I pick on young
people? The police force in general? I don't think we do pick
on young people at all. Well, I do. Will you give me an instance why we
pick on people and when we have picked on people? Well, you seem to
pick on young people more than you do on the older people. No, not at
all. Well, I think so. If Something Else is to be believed,
in the late 70s teenagers looked about 38 and were neurotically
concerned with discussing issues and pleasing the viewer.
What didn't we do that we should have done? Does it make a
difference having a programme made like this? Please write, we really
would like to hear from you. By the time the teenager concept was tried
again in 2006, this time in a ground-breaking Channel 4 show
called Whatever, presentational styles and the notion of what
constitutes an issue had both become a little more baaaaaah.
I couldn't live without pussy and my mum. Don't put them two things
together, cos I'll slap you! most proud that I've got big boobs
and when I take my bra off they don't move.
My best feature is I talk shit. I can talk shit for the world. Coming
up on tonight's Whatever: Everything you ever wanted to know
about LA gang bangers, pervy sex toys... And comedy drug-abuse!
My favourite UK hip-hop artist, Yeah, looking at this it's little
wonder TV viewing's on the wane among whippersnappers. As young
viewers continue to desert the App Store or snorting fish food
or whatever the hell it is they do, TV has redoubled its attempts to
woo them. Because these young viewers have disposable income. The
16 to 24 age bracket is a group TV as a whole is desperately keen to
pander to, with predictably awful results. Who's hungry? Case in
point, the repugnant, cackling Doritos Friendchips gang who
represented twentysomethings for several dark years in the early
noughties. These massive wankers didn't just crystallise everything
that's wrong with TV's assumptions about young people, they also
crystallise everything that's wrong with humankind as a species. The
gang were horrifically shallow and spent most of that time chuckling
at their own witlessness like toddlers amused by their own turds.
What's this one? Don't know. It's a stegosaurus! It's an extinct
stegosaurus. Heh heh heh, you bastards! I'm not sure if I'm
entirely happy with this manicure. Ha ha ha, you scum!
Nobody escape the wrath of a ninja! Ha ha ha, eat your crisps and BEEP
off! Yes, television constantly assumes
all 16 to 24 year-olds are mindless jigging gits. As a consequence,
glib, meaningless images of youth continually piss from every screen
as though the channels are engaged in some sort of unofficial contest
to see who can produce the most vapid, lowest-common-denominator
screen turds imaginable. It's like they've got no idea, any
old shit will do. Whether it's banal footage of Peter Andre roving
the earth like a backward half-emu carrot man, or a turgid exploration
of the latest celebrity Aunt Sallies, or a gaudy reality show
about over-confident, smiling young bucks, or a terrible, sex-obsessed
sitcom starring a cast at least 10 years older than the characters
they are playing. Oh! Ah! Time for a post-wank
sandwich. LAUGHTER. And dare I ask what that consists
of? Oh, well, if you must know, I grip my penis, then I pump it up
and down until seminal fluid is... LAUGHTER. I mean... I mean the
sandwich, you big gusset twonk! Plus the odd pube! LAUGHTER. Serves
you right for not controlling your urges. I couldn't help myself. I
caught sight of Casey in the shower. She weren't just washing, either.
She were, er, twitching the curtain. LAUGHTER.
You what?! You know? Pushing the envelope, rubbing the nubbin,
putting sud on the bud, cleaning the bean, taking a degree in
English cliterature... OK, OK, I get it!
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Ooh! So would she, given half the As you pass into your 30s, you're
supposed to finally start feeling like you're an adult. In fact, the
only insight you'll probably get is a sudden realisation that all the
adults who went before you didn't have a clue what they were doing at
this age either. It's an age at which people often start spawning
offspring and spending their evenings trapped indoors with the
TV, which is probably why TV assumes you will be interested in
programmes all about being indoors, such as hypnotic aspirational
property shows like Grand Designs. Or programmes that make the outside
world look offputtingly dangerous. Either that or mindless family-
orientated Saturday-night distraction festivals. Oh, God, the
horror. The horror. The horror. The horror.
Yes, I've always had an innate horror of becoming a dad, largely
and irrationally based on the portrayal of dads on TV.
Hello! Hi, Dad! Advertising dads are almost without exception tragic,
shuffling, pitiful individuals who shouldn't be fronting adverts at
all but lined up before a ditch and coldly shot in the back of their
head to put them out of their misery. They're often plump,
tortoisey men with nothing left to look forward to except plopping
their carcasses down in front of the TV to watch the match, a treat
they don't even feel they deserve. This would be great for watching
the World Cup, this. 40 inch, built-in Freeview HD, the lot.
it, you deserve a treat. Really?! They are men who have given up.
Take the 1980s Oxo dad. What sort of life did he have?
Ignored by his offspring... Belittled by his wife... Stop being
so silly! Perpetually depicted as being hopeless around the house...
Mum's out, I'm cooking. Utter disrespect.
Freeze. The poor BEEP couldn't even organise a fireworks display
without being picked on by his own kid. That was pathetic! Yeah, and
two quid of it was mine. That's nice. Disgusting! No wonder he
sometimes tries to liven up his sorry existence by making lame
jokes which nobody even finds amusing.
Oh! Oh, very funny! He made a joke, you ingrates. Look,
now he's crushed. Are you happy now? Are you happy now you've
broken him?! HOW COULD YOU, YOU Little wonder some ad dads seemed
to lose their mind completely and regress to childhood. # Ah habba-
habba yum-yum, with nuts and raisins.
# Ah habba-habba yum-yum. Oh, God, I remember this from my childhood
and it's absolutely heartbreaking. This man isn't funny - he's having
a massive mental breakdown. Once upon a time, everyone on TV
was middle-aged, and if they weren't, they at least looked like
they were actively moving towards middle age. The only place you saw
grown adults not acting their age was on kids' shows, but today,
middle aged men don't seem to be allowed to act their age anywhere
on screen. Their easy smiles mask the tragedy that they're grown
adults forced to behave like adolescents to appeal to the
younger generation. It must be absolute hell. Youth oriented BBC
Three sitcom Bumming Off, currently in its 16th season, has never been
a favourite of the critics. What's up with you? Why aren't you wet?
Because I don't fancy you. Lead character Tyrone, ostensibly aged
23, is played by 45 year-old Damien Spent. I've been Tyrone, now, for
17 years now. In that time, I've seen off most of the rest of the
cast. Like Daniel Craig, for instance? Daniel Craig, yeah, yeah.
He was my brother the first two series. We had a lot of fun before
he swanned off to play Mr Bond, in those successful films. So, just me
now. I'm under no illusion, here. Bumming Off is populist. It's not
trying to be high theatre. He means, he thought you were in the shower.
He what? Yeah, I saw you taking off your pink dressing gown. You mean
How long would you like to stay in the role? Now, I imagine that I'll
be here until they carry me out in a little wooden box. Or until the
series is cancelled and I quietly end things on my own in my dressing
room. Just say the word. Any time. I mean it. Any time at all. Back in
ye day, most TV shows were designed for an audience of adults.
Different ages and haircuts, admittedly, but adults none the
less. Barry, Sylvia, Christopher, Louise, Ray, Cheryl, Bob, Linda are
all here to play Larry Grayson's Generation Game. The family unit
that the big entertainment shows were aimed at revolved around the
wants and needs of the parents, not the kids. You have one minute 15
seconds to fill a camel, starting now. That's it, force it in. But by
the late 80s, those kids had grown up to be young TV producers
themselves, and the result was whizzy info-packed shows like
Network 7, which prided themselves on being cutting edge and full of
young faces. This in turn begat the love-it-or-hate-it weekly cringe
fest which was The Word, which set the template of almost every youth
show to follow. Outrage, idiocy, smut, idiocy, humiliation and
idiocy. As cable and satellite TV flowered during the 90s, fusty old
Variety Club faces began to be replaced by a new wave of less trad
presenters, who dressed and behaved like irreverent younger folk, and
who appeared to take absolutely nothing seriously. Before long,
everyone was being flip and cool while the old dinosaurs were being
mocked in cruelly observed comedies. Ah-ha! But it wasn't just
presenters who were getting younger. Not so long ago, when our minds
were less dominated by image, politicians were allowed, nay
expected, to resemble the human equivalent of a dusty old ledger.
But as politicians' screen presence became increasingly important, they
started feeling the pressure to look young too. Until, by 1997,
even the establishment itself seemed to have been replaced by a
younger, brighter, grinnier, more relaxed model. Zip forward to today
and all our major political figures look like bland air-freshener
salesmen, or nice neighbours from a shit soap opera. Even Hollywood
stars, who are selfishly beautiful to begin with, feel the pressure,
surgically transforming themselves into nightmarish, simplified
facsimiles of human beings, which wouldn't look out of place in a
third rate Scarborough waxworks museum. I mean, Faye Dunaway now
looks like Faye Dunaway as described by a lunatic. And Mickey
Rourke, well, you could use a photo of Mickey Rourke to scare a child
away from a plate of cookies. Having helped to establish youth as
the ultimate desire, TV's only too happy to exploit your desperate
attempts to cling on to it. Commercial breaks are awash with
pictures for anti-ageing products with stupid names. Introducing a
new reversalist. I mean, look at that. A new reversalist. It's a bit
like calling it Time Denialist or Canute-o-Cream. These are
disturbing many movies, presenting a shimmering vision of a
potentially youthier you, rendered possible by dubious-sounding
miracle science. When they analysed my face at the Ponds Institute, it
showed that my fine lines and age spots disappeared. It's OK to be 40,
just as long as you look 30. Apparently, it's OK to look 30 if
you sound about nine. There's no age you're allowed to let yourself
go any more. No, the cosmetics industry will remorselessly chase
you past the menopause and towards the coffin. I'm 68. And age re-
perfect pro-calcium is the future of my skin, and yours. God, 68 and
still sneering cosmetic paint on your canvas. -- smearing. What
next? Skeleton polishing cream? Little wonder TV devotes much of
its schedule to making older people look younger, perhaps never more
overtly than in Channel 4's long- running 10 Years Younger, a
devastatingly mean makeover show in which a punter is stripped almost
naked and paraded in front of the public, who attempt to guess how
close to the grave she is. Of course, anyone who isn't
devastatingly attractive is a non- person in telly terms, which is
probably why they discuss her as if they're trying to discuss the age
of a rusting fixture on the site of a pier. I think she's about 52,
because she's quite wrinkly and her body is quite saggy. I'd say she's
54. She looks a little bit flabby. I'd say she's about 49, she looks
really wrinkly and her stomach's all horrible. It looks like she's
probably had a few kids as well. The average score of these worms is
then totted up and this notional number is gleefully recounted to
the victim... I mean, participant. The result of the poll puts you at
an average age of 55. Crikey. well, look on the bright side - at
least you're not so old your tear ducts have shrivelled up. Luckily,
help is at hand in the form of a creepy panel of experts, who are
more than happy to give her a full physical makeover, in exchange for
little more than a fee and nationwide television exposure.
First, she meets a lovely surgeon with the bedside manner of a
detached upholsterer. She has quite a bit of excess here at the back,
so what will do his will lift the skin and take away some of that,
and create a better fold in the buttock. Then she meets a lovely
dentist. If you give me a big, wide smile. Yeah, you can tell straight
away, teeth are really badly discoloured. Try to keep that smile
up, yeah? Then she get sliced apart on camera, sewn back up, has her
gnashers zhuzhed... They look fantastic. Yeah, it just doesn't
look like my teeth. That's because it's not your BLEEP teeth. Then
she's restyled, trimmed and oranged until finally, TV considers her
acceptable. At which point, the show drags her back out to the
beach for more people to say how old she is. I'd say about 40.
And what makes you say that? looks reasonably fit, you know?
Note that during this bit, they get them to guess her age face to face,
rather than standing in another time zone, like they were earlier.
Yes, all it takes to win public acceptance is a three-month
programme of intensive surgery and dentistry. Oh, and a swimsuit high
enough to cover those surgical scars. Still, no matter how hard
you try, you can't outrun the ageing process forever. Once people
pass a certain age, they're only allowed on TV if they are being
patronised and treated as pets. Isn't that right, dear? For
instance, if you're a novelty wrinkled contestant on a crowd-
pleasing reality talent show, your entire act might as well consist of
simply stating your age. And the bigger the number, the more cheers
you generate. Do you mind me asking how old you are? 74. Wow. Mmm, good
try. If you don't mind me asking, Janey, how old are you? 80. 80?
pretty impressive. William, if you don't mind me asking, how old are
you? I'm 82. Ah, now that's what I call ageing. Old people have fallen
victim to symbolic annihilation. Excluded from the media, they feel
culturally obsolete. The irony is, old people watch more TV than any
other age group, and what do they see when they tune in? Well, they
see themselves being sidelined and belittled. No wonder they're all so
miserable. Just as toddlers are often propped up in front of the TV
screen to keep them quiet, so are old people, left there, sitting in
rows, staring mournfully at a machine that's doing its best to
ignore their very existence. But what are these old people actually
watching? Shows traditionally thought to be of interest to older
viewers include Songs Of Praise, in which rows of sycophants
desperately attempt to curry favour with a notional omnipotent deity by
singing turgid pop songs at him. Or genteel televised jumble sales like
Antiques Roadshow, in which object- owning members of the human race
stand in the grounds of dizzyingly expensive mansions, having their
worldly goods evaluated. We're talking about a figure, certainly
in excess of ã10,000. Ooh, someone's going to buy a jet ski
and ride it round and round and round, like P Diddy. Wow. Then
there's Countdown, in which the hours before the grave can be
gently whiled away solving meaningless anagrams. Countdown's a
bit of an odd choice for the elderly viewer, really. When I'm
really old, I don't think I'll want to spend my afternoons staring at a
gigantic, mercilessly ticking clock, waiting for the last few precious
seconds to expire, while two young people demonstrate their superior
mental agility. Enlarges. Enlarges, fantastic. And a nubile woman in a
figure-hugging dress taunts me with sexually charged consonants and
vowels. What have you got there, Rachel? It just came into my mind.
Brilliant. I think, when I'm 80, I'd rather watch young people being
kicked into the sea. One of the main reasons old folk are
overlooked by modern television is that advertisers aren't
particularly enthused by them. Not that they totally overlook them,
they're only too happy to perk them up with uplifting messages from
familiar faces. I've always enjoyed spending time at home with my
family and friends, but did you know that every year, over 25,000
adults under the age of 50 die in Britain. Or scooter ads which
resemble broadcasts from a rather charming future, in which a race of
silver-haired humans, who communicate exclusively through
waving, have evolved their own electronic wheels. But today, you
rarely see old folks in ads that aren't aimed at old folks. OAPs
used to feature more frequently in commercials. For instance, in the
heart warming Heinz soup ads, or the salty mini movies starring
kindly cod salesman Captain Birdseye. A man whose crew were so
young that if his ship capsized, it could be the first time they'd been
swimming since they made it to the uterus. Or in the nostalgic
Werther's Original butter candy adverts, in which a parade of
kindly, well-meaning grandpas bonded with the younger generation
by pecking them on the cheek, or leading them out into the middle of
the forest, or showing them funny photos of train crash victims. At
least, I think that's what's happening here. I mean, that's what
granddads sometimes do, yeah? But today, ads like this are scarce,
because over a decade of unrelenting offenders' register
scaremongering by the media has made images of older men enjoying
the company of young boys seem automatically less wholesome than
the makers intended. I mean, I'll watch it, but I wouldn't want it on
my hard drive. He's someone very special too, you know? Ah.
summary, then, TV has never quite got you. When you're a kiddiewink,
it's just a meaningless light source. When you're young, it
either demonises or patronises you. When you're in your middle years it
makes you feel too old by ruthlessly highlighting your flaws.
When you're older than that, it wipes you off-screen altogether and