When did this start? I'm sure as a kid pretending to be ill off school it wasn't like this. Spending the morning dipping a thermometer into my tea to make it look like I had a temperature approaching the melting point of coal, I used to enjoy lying in bed watching telly and learning random things. But now I'm an adult and can stay in bed sometimes without asking I've come to realise the difference between bunking off then and now.
For a start, those public information films showing how to use a pair of trousers to put out a chip pan fire are nowhere to be seen. And the orange cat Charlie, drawn by animators who obviously failed the Captain Pugwash audition is sadly missing. I used to enjoy him and his friend telling me that if talked to badly drawn strangers something indescribably nasty could happen, even though as they all moved at roughly four frames per second running away should have been fairly straightforward.
Where once there was a raft of Open University programs teaching morning skivers like me things like 'The Mating Cycle Of The Shrew' hosted by professors with enough facial hair to warrant their own documentary using only a whiteboard and a Venn diagram, most weekday morning television these days is dedicated to giving middle aged people fifty quid, walking them around a few fields to buy some awful clutter and then selling it at auction to see if they can raise enough cash to send themselves away on holiday somewhere equally awful. I have a feeling that 'Cash In The Attic - A Woman From West Sussex Sells Her Valuables (repeat)' being shown once every weekday morning could be a plot to repel truants back to double-maths from their stinking pits before you can say 'Venetian Ceramic Poodle'.
Another thing that's different is when I was a kid we'd get Columbo just once in the afternoon. He wasn't playing second fiddle to 'Midsomer Murders', 'Diagnosis Murder' or 'Murder She Wrote'. As the world's leading criminal investigator he had the airwaves pretty much to himself, and quite right too. He had a dirty old man's anorak, a face like a pickled goat and there was nothing twee about him or the show - Columbo was cool, and the show was just adult enough for you to think that by watching it you were quite grown up, even though that same morning you'd attempted to hypnotically suggest to your mum via the most pathetic 'but I'm dying' look you could muster that she should serve you tea and Hobnobs all day (or until at least when your Dad got home).
So in some ways pretending you were ill and staying in bed watching telly was like being in school, at the very worst it was like pretending to be in beardy-weirdy corduroy education college where Peter Falk was the lecturer. But now kids get to see a new scarier form of adult education on the Jeremy Kyle Show every morning, conveyor belts of hapless individuals exhibited to a studio audience whose parents never had the benefit of Charlie The Cat's garbled warnings and subsequently fell foul of something indescribably nasty en masse. If only they'd had the benefit of that wisdom they could have avoided the public humiliation of simmering in the boiling water of morning television like handcuffed plankton unable to form a sentence before sinking in the mire of Jeremy Kyle's patronising soup of ill advise. (Although the show does give nice children from well balanced families the chance to 'act tough' by turning the television up full blast and throwing themselves through the front window every once in a while).
Terrifying though Jeremy Kyle is, there is something even more sinister afoot - the middle class and their obsession with houses. Children with imaginary ailments up and down the country are being bombarded with scenes of developers and families doing stuff to houses all morning and afternoon. Whether it be selling, auctioning, doing up, pulling down, renovating or restoring, television is creating the next generation of estate agents by simple osmosis. If you want your kids to grow up to wear a tie, get a company car and spend most of their life walking in and out of other people's houses which they themselves will never be able to afford, let them bunk off. They can learn everything they need by staying at home and enjoying estate agent boot camp 101.
Just don't blame me if none of them ever turn up for your house viewing 'cos they've called in sick.
With all this in mind I got myself a copy of TV Quick to find out just how much of this stuff was on telly, and discovered that if you removed all the auction, murder and house programs along with The Jeremy Kyle Show from weekday television you would free up fifty seven hours and five minutes of viewing time for something else. That's two and a half days.
Murders account for 13 hours of weekday television time.
Auctions account for 15 hours.
Jeremy Kyle accounts for nearly 11 hours.
Houses account for nearly 18.5 hours of weekday programming.
What could be on instead?
Julian
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