Commercial TV costs every household in this country around 200 pounds a year, raised from advertising for products we buy (ITV 2.1bn, Sky 4.2bn, C4 0.9bn, C5 0.3bn: 7.5bn/23m=326 pounds per household), whether we watch its inane poor quality dross or not. But to put the icing on the cake they manage to ruin what few decent programmes and films they do show by riddling them with annoying adverts.
The worst example of poor quality rubbish TV is ITV. Apart from having to turn down the volume on the football commentary to stop having headaches through their bad commentary, I am now beginning to think that ITV is some sort of multinational conspiracy to limit the amount of decent films we get to watch by buying them all up to stop the BBC showing them and hiding them away in their schedules.
Take ITV4, (please take it!). It announces it is going to show excellent documentaries like OUTFOXED about Murdoch's media bias, and MANUFACTURING CONSENT about Noam Chomsky, then none of the papers give listings for the channel, and it shows them at ridiculous times of night with no pre-publicity. It was bad enough preparing myself to have to sit there zapping the adverts, but now they make it almost impossible to know when to watch them.
For anybody interested, 'Outfoxed' was on LAST NIGHT, so I bloody missed it! And there is no information on their website to when it might be shown again.
'Manufacturing Consent' is on at 11.50pm this Sunday evening, but they are prone to change their listings at the last minute, so I can't guarantee this. Bloody ITV!
On the Chomsky film, I haven't seen it yet. When I realised it was over 2 hours log, I wondered why I'd bothered taping it.
ReplyDeleteIf you saw Chomsky's defence of himself in January's Prospect, be sure also to read Oliver Kamm's 3-part response.
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