I am certainly not the first person to write this and probably not the last, but; as far as I can see, popular media is regressing. Not in that people are returning to older formats (what with all the emergent technologies like on demand television and (apparently) BBC iPlayer is coming to Wii, the range of ways in which to find stuff out has never been bigger). The first time I noticed it was with “gentle drama”. Production companies have been chucking these out for years (Heartbeat, we know where you live) and there has always been something on that is ridiculously mild mannered, yet with the recent dramatisation of Lark Rise to Candleford things came to a head. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike it (it really is quite good), but gentle isn’t the word for a TV series whose finale was a missing parcel (it’s set in a post office). I know it was originally a book, but at what point was the decision made to script it into hour long episodes?
Another thing is things which seem to be an extension of the armed services PR departments. Top Gear comes to mind, in which they raced a Bugatti Vayron against a Typhoon fighter jet, or attempted to outwit an Apache helicopter with a TVR (the Typhoon won, but the hellfire missiles on the helicopter refused to lock on, this was solved by saying they would have used the chain gun instead). Then Giant Engines or whatever it was called, in which that chap off Red Dwarf waxed lyrical about the wonders of the 120mm cannon mounted on the British Army’s Main-Battle-Tank.
Then there is the re-birth and “re-imagining” of TV, film, plays, the re-formation of bands (Spice Girls? The Verve?) (ok, The Verve is acceptable).
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