Lord Peter Mandelson, Uk Ambassador
News0 min ago
why is television so BAD ?!?!
bruce springsteen wrote a song some years ago, 57 channels and theres nothing on.... it has been said many a time that were 10 years behind the americans. well, guess what... our t.v. has caught up with theirs.. now we have loads of channels but there`s nowt to watch... perhaps thats why we all pay to use the internet !
No best answer has yet been selected by funkymoped. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.It's the law of diminishing returns. The more channels we have, the less reasonable entertainment there is to fill them with.
Culture, and television is a massive reflection and catalyst of culture, is changing at a rate unknown to previous generations. The 'fame' culture is intriniscally linked with television, and the competition for viewers' attenmtion is fiercer than ever before.
The BBC has to balance its public service remit to 'entertain, educate and inform' against commercial channels driven by ever-decreasing shares of advertising revenue, which must be fought over more intensely than ever.
The end result is 'instant' TV - little time to develop ideas or talent, the relentness need to pull viewers means that the likes of Only Fools and Fawlty Towers - both slow starters, and now national institutions, would have been pulled before finishing their first series.
Be seriously selective, there is good material out there, it's just not as routine and easy to find as it used to be, but it is there. Oh, and Big Brother is on its way back ....!
I'm having the opposite problem: between a full (excluding sport) cable package and the net I am having to be strict on what I watch as there's too much good stuff at the moment. A few series are ending soon (though it'll be time for "Deadwood" to start) but that should give me a chance to catch up on the taped stuff!
(I tend to watch US dramas/crime/SF).