Desi Arnaz - Pro Choice

November 2^nd – One thing about progress, once it’s done it’s done; you can’t undo it; you can do without it but can’t reverse it and that can often spoil a perfectly balanced set of circumstances and turn something from friend to foe; be careful what you wish for…. Take TV and that dreadfully overworked political word choice for instance.

Where things go tits is the supposition we’ve been suckered into, up to the point where we really believe that having countless avenues of choice will provide the stability needed to repair shoddy, dangerous services that threaten life and limb but which, in fact, only give a cats-cradle of excuse pathways for the myriad suppliers when the poo hits the propeller. It’s come to the point now when, on a challenge from the Floor of the House to a government minister who has been found to be in charge of a sensibility-challenged department, now says, and I quote;

This is an unacceptable situation and I can assure the House that I will call in an independent group of consultants immediately and then report fully, once their report is available, in 12 months time.

My first reaction to this is to shout at the radio;

If you’ve got to call in a group of consultants to sort out the mess you’ve made then what the fuck am I paying you for? May just as well employ them and sack the fuck out of you; save on salary and idiocy.

And that, magnified by ten, is what we’ve done to the National Health Service. We’ve allowed successive governments to hive out the various sections of supply and treatment to their mates to make a profit from all the time telling the client (that’s us, the patient) that all this choice will make us better…which it won’t but we continue to be too busy to challenge them. Yes we have unprecedented choice in which hospital we go to for treatment, but when you’re gasping for air in the centre of a heart attack my guess is the last thing you want to have to do is take time out to consider which hospital will give you the best chance of survival; surely it should be equal across the board, shouldn’t it, or have I misunderstood something? And we can equate that ideology by looking at just where multiple-choice will take us by scrutinising present-day television channels.

Out of the hundreds of channels available there are only four terrestrial ones that carry no advertising. All the others are funded by their advertising revenues and, consequently, one can flick through fifteen or twenty channels without actually seeing a programme being broadcast. All is ads all giving children, who watch TV from the age of 1, a totally skewed idea of life and, like the WONGA ads, are baptising them with the loan-life philosophy from the get-go (BTW didn’t everyone think that WONGA were just a bunch of shysters…? Or was it just me?) These ad-breaks often run for eight or ten minute slots and in addition to the Shopping Channels which seem to grow exponentially by the week. The other channels are re-run and cheap TV sites (CCTV footage) and what becomes obvious as you vainly switch channels in order to find something, anything that’s either vaguely interesting or that you’ve not seen before, is that more choice just means more choice of shite. What’s brought on this diatribe of invective? Well, on this day in 1986, Desi Arnaz died (although he did get an extension in some obits as having passed on in December…which is a fat lot of good to him now but still…).

For those not au fait with this guy, he was the partner of Lucille Ball when they did a TV series called, I Love Lucy which began broadcasting in Great Britain in 1955. This was a time of B/W TV and just a duet of television broadcasters (there are now 480): The BBC and ITA. ITA chose the show as a vehicle for showing its credentials (they had only just begun broadcasting) and although the programme was only then available in the London area it still racked up the number two slot for popularity in 1955. How popular? I do believe that even now, today, 2014, somewhere in the world an episode of I Love Lucy is screening as it has done since its inception. Thing is, I’m not advocating we return to those days (don’t need to – see above) but what those original figures meant was that with only two channels to choose from, the output was of high production and content value and what’s far, far more important, was restricted in its output hours in a locally broadcast show the viewing figures were such that they could not only be toted up but were sufficient to put that show in at number two which meant that although we had restricted access to TV and in the channels and times too and we went outside to learn about the world and played it still knocked ’em in!

As part of Desilu Productions, Mr. Arnaz and Ms. Ball were the first real showbiz entrepreneurs and even back then laid the groundwork for what they called basic good taste, determined to avoid ethnic jokes as well as humour based on handicaps, mental disabilities, and so on. Because they were one of the few, what they espoused to was seen as the template for TV broadcasting. A level all should aspire to.

Blown out the water now, of course, ‘cos the more channels there are the more the taste envelope can be pushed to the point where we end up with the choice we have now; 480 channels containing the odd piece of original work but mainly consisting of rolling news TV, franchise TV, re-run TV, porn TV, cruelty TV, live brutality TV, live stupidity TV, embarrassing TV…or ads.