k-punk

Stubbs on BBC2 . Couldn’t agree more. As for Channel Four, well, when I stumbled across some of the Games last week (even I couldn’t watch that, honest), I thought: jesus christ, has Channel Four come to THIS? Selecting The Games as an object of disgust or talismanic indicator of C4’s decline is perhaps a little arbitrary. After all, most of its homegrown output, whether it be inconsequent interior decorating/ holiday/ lifestyle shows, exploitation/ humiliation TV (Wifeswap, How Clean is Your House?) or Graham – high queen of Pomo – Norton, is depressingly poor. But sometimes you’re just taken aback, y’
know. The cynical forces behind BBC2 and C4 would smile indulgently at Potter’s idea that television was the real national theatre. The ultimate result of dumbing down is not, as its champions would no doubt want to claim, the collapse of cultural hierarchy and privilege. Just the opposite in fact. The increasingly prevalent belief that television is ‘just trash’, that demanding some standards is somehow snobbish, is actually elitism in its crudest form. ‘Real’ culture is to be found elsewhere, in the places the controllers of C4 and BBC2 go in their spare time. It’s not for the likes of us.