Hoodies: New Paedophiles for Summer ’05
In the Seventies Stuart Hall and some other social theorists produced an excellent study of the media’s role in generating convenient social panic (called Policing the Crisis.) Believe it or not, rather than paedophiles, car-jackers, motorway rapists or joy riders, the term making its UK debut was ‘muggers’. Mugging, the authors pointed out, was just a groovy new term for a very old crime. Theft involving personal assault had been around as long as civil society. The only novel thing was the term mugging, imported from the States.
Mugging certainly is a powerful word, so much it’s become the defining term for that type of crime. Just as a noise, it works well. It sounds a bit like slugging, possibly with a cosh, or maybe being smothered by having a mug pushed over your face, or perhaps a po. More than anything though, as the authors suggest, it’s favoured because it implies that the attacker considers the victim of the crime to be a mug. Such a depraved outlook is a useful media tool, even if it rarely is the case. It makes thieves all the more evil and incomprehensible, more frightening for sure. You can imagine them all gathering in snooker halls at the end of the day, to smoke cigars and laugh at how stupid we all are.
I was mugged at knifepoint on Copacabana beach, a revolting experience that returned in flashes for weeks, so I am no friend of such people. However, the seventeen year old who did it didn’t look very pleased with himself. He may have spent that evening doing coke, or he may have spent it with his mother and father in one of a million corrugated shacks on the hillside beyond the hotels, but I’ll bet he didn’t spend it laughing about me.
Like muggers, those labelled ‘hoodies’ dish out an archaic form of unpleasantness. I can’t say whether sadistic child-on-child violence is on the increase, but it’s always been there to some degree. There’s always a section of youth disturbed enough to enjoy gratuitous violence. Certainly was at my school and certainly still is. If it does vary in degree I’m sure economics has far more to do with it than jogging-tops. (My brother recalls that it was leather biker jackets that got you barred when he was a lad. Hell’s Angels, the lot of them.)
One might doubt the sincerity of the media at such times. You have to ask, if such blitzkriegs actually work, then isn’t it irresponsible for them ever to stop? Moreover, aren’t we risking countless other social evils by not concentrating on them just as intensely? What are the paedophiles getting up to now The Sun has taken its eye off their balls? Should we expect an increase in the number of sexual assaults upon children since the hoodie rode into media-land, on another pupil’s BMX? Without tabloid vigilance, and dedicated evening campaigns on the estate (against paediatricians and philatelists) it’s a wonder any of us still have our children. I’m surprised Jonathan King hasn’t caught them all and baked them in a big pie.
The chief concern here, as usual, is copy. Hoodies, like paedophiles, make great monsters for the media to write about, and sell. In both cases the added threat of spooky technology provides good plot seasoning. Like paedophiles, hoodies love their mobiles. The former use them to film trampoline users, the latter to film their beatings. In both cases the technology gives them a opportunity to savour their perversity, and even share it with others.
Although chilling, you have to wonder how often such things actually happen. You also have to wonder how much of this ugliness is disseminated and prompted by the campaigns themselves. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that a few Nelsons did think “Har!-Har!” when they watched that evening’s news, and dutifully took the memes down to their playground the next morning. That’s the risk of making a fetish out of something nasty. It appeals to fetishists.
And of course the knock-on from all this celebration of fear is more fearfulness. Boys in hooded tops. Another symbol for little old ladies to shrink away from. It’s also a great smokescreen issue as the truth about Iraq reaches exploding point. Anything to take our minds off that.
Wednesday 25 May 2005
Monday 9 May 2005
Jam Today! (pay tomorrow)
There’s a link between using credit and using alcohol, or any other recreational drug. In both cases you’re opting to have the nice bit first and the horrible bit after. Like the warm glow induced by a pint of Stella, the warm glow induced by purchasing products on the never-never is always followed by a hangover of some sort. Even if you only have the one, you feel listless and want another. Pleasure yesterday, pay today.
It’s an exact reversal of the more virtuous deferred reward strategy, where you eat your greens on the promise of jam roly-poly for afters. Instead, you first gorge on pudding and then have to face the broccoli.
These two opposing strategies are deployed in many aspects of human life. Resisting scratching a mosquito bite is of the first kind. Holding back breaks the cycle of irritation and the whole thing’s soon forgotten. Jam tomorrow. Alternatively you can have near-orgasms dragging your nails over it, but at the price of still having it, itchier than ever, a month later. Jam today. Similarly, vigorous exercise can be a daunting prospect, but it’s more than justified by the endorphin buzz that follows. More than can be said for street heroin. A definite case of jam today, hell to pay.
Learning the merits of deferred reward is an essential part of growing up, and The Little Red Hen is the parable. She didn’t shilly-shally like the other animals. She planted corn, ground flour, and baked bread, all without help from her neighbours. So when the aromas started to waft, and they came asking, she told them where to get off. Presumably a Methodist of some sort.
Indeed, the concept of a heavenly afterlife is the ultimate deferred reward strategy, though it’s questionable who gets rewarded. Accept a miserable existence in this world on the promise of eternal glory ever after. A shrewd means for the wealthy and powerful to scare the poor into compliance.
Some people want to have their roly-poly and eat it. Margaret Thatcher liked to align herself with the hen, but only when it suited: “You don’t spend money you haven’t got!” is a useful chant when you want to get public assets into private hands, but it’s forgotten when it comes to chucking money at arms manufacturers. ‘Credit’ is then elevated to ‘investment’. “Simply good housekeeping!” is another killer, coming from the Prime Minister who did so much to turn her country into the home of credit-card lunacy. That’s not bad housekeeping, that’s personal freedom.
Investment and credit are closely intertwined, two sides of the same coin. The credit run-up by the irresponsible cardholder is at the same time MasterCard’s shrewd investment. Your loss, their gain. Furthermore, it’s not always irresponsible to borrow. You can borrow as a means of investing, on the hope that the investment will itself more than cover the interest on the borrowed money. Similarly, as a consumer you can use credit wisely to pick up a true bargain that might be gone by the time your wages come in. The problems start when you borrow money but have no intention of investing it, like credit-junkie consumers, or John DeLorean in business.
Drugs and tic share a similar danger. Both allow you to steal from the future. The product you can’t afford this month steals next month’s wages, plus interest. A big Saturday night out steals happiness from poor old Monday morning, perhaps right through to strung-out Wednesday afternoon. You’ve got to pay sometime.
It’s an exact reversal of the more virtuous deferred reward strategy, where you eat your greens on the promise of jam roly-poly for afters. Instead, you first gorge on pudding and then have to face the broccoli.
These two opposing strategies are deployed in many aspects of human life. Resisting scratching a mosquito bite is of the first kind. Holding back breaks the cycle of irritation and the whole thing’s soon forgotten. Jam tomorrow. Alternatively you can have near-orgasms dragging your nails over it, but at the price of still having it, itchier than ever, a month later. Jam today. Similarly, vigorous exercise can be a daunting prospect, but it’s more than justified by the endorphin buzz that follows. More than can be said for street heroin. A definite case of jam today, hell to pay.
Learning the merits of deferred reward is an essential part of growing up, and The Little Red Hen is the parable. She didn’t shilly-shally like the other animals. She planted corn, ground flour, and baked bread, all without help from her neighbours. So when the aromas started to waft, and they came asking, she told them where to get off. Presumably a Methodist of some sort.
Indeed, the concept of a heavenly afterlife is the ultimate deferred reward strategy, though it’s questionable who gets rewarded. Accept a miserable existence in this world on the promise of eternal glory ever after. A shrewd means for the wealthy and powerful to scare the poor into compliance.
Some people want to have their roly-poly and eat it. Margaret Thatcher liked to align herself with the hen, but only when it suited: “You don’t spend money you haven’t got!” is a useful chant when you want to get public assets into private hands, but it’s forgotten when it comes to chucking money at arms manufacturers. ‘Credit’ is then elevated to ‘investment’. “Simply good housekeeping!” is another killer, coming from the Prime Minister who did so much to turn her country into the home of credit-card lunacy. That’s not bad housekeeping, that’s personal freedom.
Investment and credit are closely intertwined, two sides of the same coin. The credit run-up by the irresponsible cardholder is at the same time MasterCard’s shrewd investment. Your loss, their gain. Furthermore, it’s not always irresponsible to borrow. You can borrow as a means of investing, on the hope that the investment will itself more than cover the interest on the borrowed money. Similarly, as a consumer you can use credit wisely to pick up a true bargain that might be gone by the time your wages come in. The problems start when you borrow money but have no intention of investing it, like credit-junkie consumers, or John DeLorean in business.
Drugs and tic share a similar danger. Both allow you to steal from the future. The product you can’t afford this month steals next month’s wages, plus interest. A big Saturday night out steals happiness from poor old Monday morning, perhaps right through to strung-out Wednesday afternoon. You’ve got to pay sometime.
Tuesday 3 May 2005
Distorting Demand (Part II)
Corporate Keynesianism
The other flaw in the ‘market freedom’ argument is the likely size of any organisation that can afford prime advertising space. Million pound adverts cost millions. Television advertising is never going to help the smaller producer to grow. In fact it’s one of the key methods used by corporations to bankrupt and absorb smaller rivals.
As standard histories tell, commercial television was introduced to Britain as a means of re-inflating a sluggish post-war economy. By raising the profile of products it was hoped consumer demand would grow, and along with it industry. Successful though this was, it’s important to note which businesses actually benefited. The first advert, after all, was for Gibb’s SR toothpaste. While this multinational may have helped inflate its own coffers, and those of some retailers, the effect would have been deflating for any smaller rival, a drop in demand. Gibb’s was using glossy imagery to squeeze the life out of smaller, rival tubes.
It doesn’t take long to work out who it was pushing for the introduction of commercial television. Certainly big American players like Kellogg’s and Proctor and Gamble must have been delighted at the prospect. A killing to be made. For the first time tried and tested campaigns could play in British homes. A whole nation to make passionate about soap, and negative towards the humble soap they’d always taken for granted.
Clearly the term ‘re-inflating the economy’ is very subjective. Who gets to re-inflate? One person’s boom is always another’s bust. In the case of re-inflating the economy with expensive adverts it’s clear which section of the economy is going to do the growing. It has to be the big fish. Small and medium bourgeois never get a look in. Television adverts are a means for the already powerful to squeeze out smaller producers. They’re a key tool for corporate globalisation, a great way to slash, burn and strip domestic rivals.
Adverts are warps in the fabric of demand-space. Strange then, one might think, that those who push hardest for commercialisation of television are those who most vehemently oppose state intervention in the economy. It’s characteristic monetarist hypocrisy. Like the other form of demand management that dare not speak its name, military Keynesianism, corporate market interference is an exception to all those free market values. Whereas it’s a crime against the freedom of the market for a government to subsidise public transport, it’s an inalienable right of corporations to use psychological trickery to skew markets in their favour.
That’s the monetarist concept of market freedom: Government must not interfere in the economy, but huge unaccountable multinationals must be allowed to skew it anyway that suits. Governmental attempts to manage demand lead to unfair competition and subsidise inefficiency, but private million-dollar brainwashing campaigns are the stuff of free markets. Adam Smith must be spinning.
The victors
Skewing markets and asset-stripping the losers frees-up a lot of money. This can’t all go to the sponsoring corporation of course. Those who assist receive a share of the booty, ad agencies for one. Then there’s also the transmission medium itself, the television company and the accompanying programmes. And of course there’s the actors and celebrities who play in the commercials. Most will have never seen a pay-check a fraction of the size, even for their most celebrated work
It must be very tempting. Just that one advert won’t hurt. But of course if it didn’t hurt someone the sponsors wouldn’t bother. It must hurt someone’s wallet, or someone’s business, if it can free-up those sort of appearance fees. For an ad to pay it must distort demand sufficiently to pay for itself, and some more. Robbie Coltrane, I’m sure, would argue that the sum Barclays offered him was simply irresistible, enough to sort you out for life. Nevertheless, as with the oil company PR, his contribution was to soften the image of a global corporation. After all, how bad can Barclays really be when big cuddly Robbie will do adverts for them, doing Tai Chi? He’s even made the odd left-wing comment in his time.
It’s horrible to say, but unavoidable to conclude, that by helping to paint Barclays in a good light he was helping them to maintain their record of unethical investment, and getting a slice of the spoils in payment. Where else would that sort of money come from, and that sort of desperation for a cuddly make-over? Same for the distressing sight of Run DMC in a GAP commercial. Whichever way you hold it up it’s Run DMC profiting from foreign sweated labour, and anxious western teenagers.
Sainsbury’s PR department announced with glee that it had caused a palpable warp in demand when Jamie Oliver started to feature in their ads. Prunella Scales ably assists Tesco in its plan to take over the world. There are richer Pepsi directors, and fatter children, thanks to Gary Lineker’s crisp adverts. What other conclusion can you draw? None of these seem unkind people, but the money they were paid certainly has a smell about it.
Big companies, such as supermarkets, might argue that they’re only using advertising to put each other out of business. Whatever the ethics of that, it’s obvious who’ll definitely lose in such a rich man’s game. Some adverts might only target large rivals but their attempts to out-gloss and out-bargain each other can’t help but turn us off smaller producers. Adverts show us how bargain filled, cheap, clean and obliging multinationals are, and even make us feel sophisticated for shopping there. Remind you of many independent retailers? How will Arkwright and Granville ever hope to compete with that?
Adverts are creative
Another grounds for defence of adverts is their occasional beauty, ingenuity and creativity. That they can be so attractive, funny and well made can give the impression that they themselves constitute a valuable part of television. Truth is, all that money and talent could have been spent on making the TV programmes.
“The adverts are better than the programs!” It’s a cliché, but a painfully accurate one. Many programmes do look shabby in contrast to the ads. This is not something to congratulate the ad industry on, it just shows had bad we have allowed things to become. Adverts outshine programs because corporations have gained a stranglehold on the industry. However pretty commercials might seem, they remain parasitic upon the medium of television. We shouldn’t celebrate the fact that a parasite is prospering.
Contrary to common belief not all parasitic growths are ugly and misshapen. Some actually beautify their host. The peacock’s fan is a beautiful thing, but in an important sense the genes that give rise to it are parasitic. Outside a sexual context it’s a huge liability. Extremely wasteful in terms of growth and maintenance, and an asset to predators. It only exists because the genes for big fans in peacocks, and the genes for fancying big fans in peahens, drove each other into orbit. If you could somehow magically erase the genes for peacock’s tail feathers and the genes that make peahens select flamboyant males, the species would make a net gain. They’d be faster, more agile, and have a much smaller dietary requirement.
Like peacocks’ fans, some adverts are highly attractive. However if television is to serve public rather than corporate needs, this is a dire state of affairs. If TV is the host to advertising it is being sucked dry. The parasite grows plumper and more lavish as it suckles. The host becomes the deferent party, modifying its patterns of behaviour to suit the parasite’s demands. Which brings us to the last misconception.
Advertising provides free television
I remember the first time I saw an advert for an advert. In fact the chain was longer. It was an advert for a TV programme which itself was only being shown to get people to sit still long enough to watch other adverts. From the side of a New York city bus smiling anchors invited drivers to tune-in to that night’s news. Although commonplace now, at the time it seemed odd, mistaken, inefficient in the extreme. A commercial station, one which relied solely upon the revenue of advertisers, was itself running advertisements for its own programs. Adverts to make you watch programmes to make you watch adverts.
It was my father, again, who was the first to point out to me the real cost of commercial television. There’s no such thing as free lunch, and commercial television is not charity work. The cost of producing television programmes must be met by the consumer at some point. In the main it is at the point of sale. We pay for commercial television in increased cost of goods. However, the structure of commercial TV being what it is we pay a great deal more for it. Commercial television is a criminally wasteful means of making programmes.
If we pay for television directly, say from a licence scheme or income tax, the money can all be targeted at making programmes, uninterrupted by commercial clutter. Instead, we pay for commercial television by an invisible sales tax, one that has countless other costs to cover before anything can go toward program making. Executive salaries for ad agencies, focus groups and opinion pollsters; technical staff to make the adverts and a host of creatives to dream them up; actors, make-up, caterers, location filming; promotional fees, magazine and billboard adverts to encourage people to watch a program, to watch the adverts. Moreover, there’s the whole array of shareholders, every step of the way, all demanding a return on their investment. After all that, what’s left over can be spent on making programmes. Wonder why the adverts look superior?
What’s wrong with TV is the adverts
In the current climate, bald statements like “Television is bad for you” are quite understandable, but you have to be clear about your meaning of ‘television’. The physical medium, as in two-dimensional images accompanied by sound, is not something intrinsically destructive, no more pernicious than writing or painting. In fact it’s no more, or less, pernicious than those who control its output. Differing forms of ownership give rise to different kinds of television, and what the viewer considers the medium of television to be. Depending where you’re from, television means different things. In the USSR it was state owned and so produced formal state propaganda. In the USA, state licensing and corporate ownership means commercialism and state-corporate propaganda. Neither output is intrinsic to broadcast television, it’s all just historical happenstance. You can’t blame a screen and a loudspeaker for the signals they receive.
One valid objection, regarding my claim that all the money that goes on advertising could be spent on the programs: In truth of course, without corporate sponsorship that money wouldn’t even be on the table. The television industry would be a fraction of the size it is, and would produce a fraction of the programs. Perfectly true, but then would that be a bad thing? It would certainly mean no Big Brother, Topless Darts or thirteenth season of Friends. The only reason such desperate programs get made is because they yield sizeable audiences who then can be made to sit through adverts. Instead TV could return to what it used to be. One or two channels broadcasting for a few hours each day. Perhaps people could rediscover life again. What a frightening thought.
Once again however, it’s the problem of loving your enemy. Commercial TV has eaten its way into our lives. Twenty-four hour junk has become something many would fight to the death to maintain. I overheard an interesting discussion between an American couple on a train out of London. They’d just landed, she for the first time, and he was having difficulty explaining the TV licence system to her. She found it unbelievable that TV could be restricted, let alone that you could end up in prison for not paying: “My Gahd! If they tried that in the States there’d be riots!”, which is probably true.
The fact that television has slipped into corporate hands makes it all but impossible to wrestle back. Corporations own it and they aren’t about to let go. Limitless sex, glamour, romance, violence and the occasional worthy programme are at their disposal, at no visible cost to the viewer. Asking people to pay a new charge to receive only a fraction of current output is a doomed sales pitch. Commercial television has the medium of television by the balls. Before any change can occur corporate power itself will have to be challenged.
The other flaw in the ‘market freedom’ argument is the likely size of any organisation that can afford prime advertising space. Million pound adverts cost millions. Television advertising is never going to help the smaller producer to grow. In fact it’s one of the key methods used by corporations to bankrupt and absorb smaller rivals.
As standard histories tell, commercial television was introduced to Britain as a means of re-inflating a sluggish post-war economy. By raising the profile of products it was hoped consumer demand would grow, and along with it industry. Successful though this was, it’s important to note which businesses actually benefited. The first advert, after all, was for Gibb’s SR toothpaste. While this multinational may have helped inflate its own coffers, and those of some retailers, the effect would have been deflating for any smaller rival, a drop in demand. Gibb’s was using glossy imagery to squeeze the life out of smaller, rival tubes.
It doesn’t take long to work out who it was pushing for the introduction of commercial television. Certainly big American players like Kellogg’s and Proctor and Gamble must have been delighted at the prospect. A killing to be made. For the first time tried and tested campaigns could play in British homes. A whole nation to make passionate about soap, and negative towards the humble soap they’d always taken for granted.
Clearly the term ‘re-inflating the economy’ is very subjective. Who gets to re-inflate? One person’s boom is always another’s bust. In the case of re-inflating the economy with expensive adverts it’s clear which section of the economy is going to do the growing. It has to be the big fish. Small and medium bourgeois never get a look in. Television adverts are a means for the already powerful to squeeze out smaller producers. They’re a key tool for corporate globalisation, a great way to slash, burn and strip domestic rivals.
Adverts are warps in the fabric of demand-space. Strange then, one might think, that those who push hardest for commercialisation of television are those who most vehemently oppose state intervention in the economy. It’s characteristic monetarist hypocrisy. Like the other form of demand management that dare not speak its name, military Keynesianism, corporate market interference is an exception to all those free market values. Whereas it’s a crime against the freedom of the market for a government to subsidise public transport, it’s an inalienable right of corporations to use psychological trickery to skew markets in their favour.
That’s the monetarist concept of market freedom: Government must not interfere in the economy, but huge unaccountable multinationals must be allowed to skew it anyway that suits. Governmental attempts to manage demand lead to unfair competition and subsidise inefficiency, but private million-dollar brainwashing campaigns are the stuff of free markets. Adam Smith must be spinning.
The victors
Skewing markets and asset-stripping the losers frees-up a lot of money. This can’t all go to the sponsoring corporation of course. Those who assist receive a share of the booty, ad agencies for one. Then there’s also the transmission medium itself, the television company and the accompanying programmes. And of course there’s the actors and celebrities who play in the commercials. Most will have never seen a pay-check a fraction of the size, even for their most celebrated work
It must be very tempting. Just that one advert won’t hurt. But of course if it didn’t hurt someone the sponsors wouldn’t bother. It must hurt someone’s wallet, or someone’s business, if it can free-up those sort of appearance fees. For an ad to pay it must distort demand sufficiently to pay for itself, and some more. Robbie Coltrane, I’m sure, would argue that the sum Barclays offered him was simply irresistible, enough to sort you out for life. Nevertheless, as with the oil company PR, his contribution was to soften the image of a global corporation. After all, how bad can Barclays really be when big cuddly Robbie will do adverts for them, doing Tai Chi? He’s even made the odd left-wing comment in his time.
It’s horrible to say, but unavoidable to conclude, that by helping to paint Barclays in a good light he was helping them to maintain their record of unethical investment, and getting a slice of the spoils in payment. Where else would that sort of money come from, and that sort of desperation for a cuddly make-over? Same for the distressing sight of Run DMC in a GAP commercial. Whichever way you hold it up it’s Run DMC profiting from foreign sweated labour, and anxious western teenagers.
Sainsbury’s PR department announced with glee that it had caused a palpable warp in demand when Jamie Oliver started to feature in their ads. Prunella Scales ably assists Tesco in its plan to take over the world. There are richer Pepsi directors, and fatter children, thanks to Gary Lineker’s crisp adverts. What other conclusion can you draw? None of these seem unkind people, but the money they were paid certainly has a smell about it.
Big companies, such as supermarkets, might argue that they’re only using advertising to put each other out of business. Whatever the ethics of that, it’s obvious who’ll definitely lose in such a rich man’s game. Some adverts might only target large rivals but their attempts to out-gloss and out-bargain each other can’t help but turn us off smaller producers. Adverts show us how bargain filled, cheap, clean and obliging multinationals are, and even make us feel sophisticated for shopping there. Remind you of many independent retailers? How will Arkwright and Granville ever hope to compete with that?
Adverts are creative
Another grounds for defence of adverts is their occasional beauty, ingenuity and creativity. That they can be so attractive, funny and well made can give the impression that they themselves constitute a valuable part of television. Truth is, all that money and talent could have been spent on making the TV programmes.
“The adverts are better than the programs!” It’s a cliché, but a painfully accurate one. Many programmes do look shabby in contrast to the ads. This is not something to congratulate the ad industry on, it just shows had bad we have allowed things to become. Adverts outshine programs because corporations have gained a stranglehold on the industry. However pretty commercials might seem, they remain parasitic upon the medium of television. We shouldn’t celebrate the fact that a parasite is prospering.
Contrary to common belief not all parasitic growths are ugly and misshapen. Some actually beautify their host. The peacock’s fan is a beautiful thing, but in an important sense the genes that give rise to it are parasitic. Outside a sexual context it’s a huge liability. Extremely wasteful in terms of growth and maintenance, and an asset to predators. It only exists because the genes for big fans in peacocks, and the genes for fancying big fans in peahens, drove each other into orbit. If you could somehow magically erase the genes for peacock’s tail feathers and the genes that make peahens select flamboyant males, the species would make a net gain. They’d be faster, more agile, and have a much smaller dietary requirement.
Like peacocks’ fans, some adverts are highly attractive. However if television is to serve public rather than corporate needs, this is a dire state of affairs. If TV is the host to advertising it is being sucked dry. The parasite grows plumper and more lavish as it suckles. The host becomes the deferent party, modifying its patterns of behaviour to suit the parasite’s demands. Which brings us to the last misconception.
Advertising provides free television
I remember the first time I saw an advert for an advert. In fact the chain was longer. It was an advert for a TV programme which itself was only being shown to get people to sit still long enough to watch other adverts. From the side of a New York city bus smiling anchors invited drivers to tune-in to that night’s news. Although commonplace now, at the time it seemed odd, mistaken, inefficient in the extreme. A commercial station, one which relied solely upon the revenue of advertisers, was itself running advertisements for its own programs. Adverts to make you watch programmes to make you watch adverts.
It was my father, again, who was the first to point out to me the real cost of commercial television. There’s no such thing as free lunch, and commercial television is not charity work. The cost of producing television programmes must be met by the consumer at some point. In the main it is at the point of sale. We pay for commercial television in increased cost of goods. However, the structure of commercial TV being what it is we pay a great deal more for it. Commercial television is a criminally wasteful means of making programmes.
If we pay for television directly, say from a licence scheme or income tax, the money can all be targeted at making programmes, uninterrupted by commercial clutter. Instead, we pay for commercial television by an invisible sales tax, one that has countless other costs to cover before anything can go toward program making. Executive salaries for ad agencies, focus groups and opinion pollsters; technical staff to make the adverts and a host of creatives to dream them up; actors, make-up, caterers, location filming; promotional fees, magazine and billboard adverts to encourage people to watch a program, to watch the adverts. Moreover, there’s the whole array of shareholders, every step of the way, all demanding a return on their investment. After all that, what’s left over can be spent on making programmes. Wonder why the adverts look superior?
What’s wrong with TV is the adverts
In the current climate, bald statements like “Television is bad for you” are quite understandable, but you have to be clear about your meaning of ‘television’. The physical medium, as in two-dimensional images accompanied by sound, is not something intrinsically destructive, no more pernicious than writing or painting. In fact it’s no more, or less, pernicious than those who control its output. Differing forms of ownership give rise to different kinds of television, and what the viewer considers the medium of television to be. Depending where you’re from, television means different things. In the USSR it was state owned and so produced formal state propaganda. In the USA, state licensing and corporate ownership means commercialism and state-corporate propaganda. Neither output is intrinsic to broadcast television, it’s all just historical happenstance. You can’t blame a screen and a loudspeaker for the signals they receive.
One valid objection, regarding my claim that all the money that goes on advertising could be spent on the programs: In truth of course, without corporate sponsorship that money wouldn’t even be on the table. The television industry would be a fraction of the size it is, and would produce a fraction of the programs. Perfectly true, but then would that be a bad thing? It would certainly mean no Big Brother, Topless Darts or thirteenth season of Friends. The only reason such desperate programs get made is because they yield sizeable audiences who then can be made to sit through adverts. Instead TV could return to what it used to be. One or two channels broadcasting for a few hours each day. Perhaps people could rediscover life again. What a frightening thought.
Once again however, it’s the problem of loving your enemy. Commercial TV has eaten its way into our lives. Twenty-four hour junk has become something many would fight to the death to maintain. I overheard an interesting discussion between an American couple on a train out of London. They’d just landed, she for the first time, and he was having difficulty explaining the TV licence system to her. She found it unbelievable that TV could be restricted, let alone that you could end up in prison for not paying: “My Gahd! If they tried that in the States there’d be riots!”, which is probably true.
The fact that television has slipped into corporate hands makes it all but impossible to wrestle back. Corporations own it and they aren’t about to let go. Limitless sex, glamour, romance, violence and the occasional worthy programme are at their disposal, at no visible cost to the viewer. Asking people to pay a new charge to receive only a fraction of current output is a doomed sales pitch. Commercial television has the medium of television by the balls. Before any change can occur corporate power itself will have to be challenged.
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