Tag Archives: television

Vietnam – Where the Dregs of English Language Broadcasting Go to Die

In Vietnam there seem to be fairly few youth hostels, so we’ve been staying in hotels and guesthouses. Blowing the budget, but needs must. Anyway, this means that we have been getting some little luxuries like satellite tv. Usually there’s only a couple of English language channels, and the quality of the programming is not high. I have mainly been watching:

1. America’s Next Top Model – I used to watch this a few years ago when I had that channel, so this is a bit of a guilty pleasure. Miss J is no longer on the panel, having been replaced by what appears to be his dad. They let NotedFashionPhotographerMrNigelBarker do a lot more talking, which I think is a bad move.

2. Asian music channels – these are dominated by boy and girl bands, and each band seems to have 8, 10, 15 members. Sometimes you can go through a whole video trying to count them and at the end you can only be sure that it’s somewhere between 9 and 12.

3. Various cookery programmes featuring Gordon Ramsey swearing

4. English football – if Liverpool are playing, Mr Beet won’t let me change channel during half-time or post-match analysis, even though said analysis is in Vietnamese.

5. The Bachelorette – I guess “the Spinster” was a less catchy title, although it does have the advantage of being an actual word. A woman whittles down potential suitors. It is the most despicable programme I have ever seen, and I have watched and enjoyed Take Me Out with Paddy McGuinness. I think it may bs an Al-Qaeda recruitment video. It certainly makes me want to start a jihad against the immoral, decadent West.

6. Groomer Has It – essentially America’s Next Top Dog Groomer.

7. Mr Bean – actually makes me ashamed to be British.

I’m a bad person…

The father of a student who got brain damage in the demonstrations was being interviewed on the news.  He was in his living room and there’s a box of the board game cranium in the background.  I shouldn’t laugh…

Breakfast Television. Gah!! 7

Turned on this morning to see the BBC Breakfast presenters getting the latest news on the Irish economy from pop band The Script.

“And now for the latest on the trapped New Zealand miners, over to Brendan from Strictly Come Dancing.”

Breakfast Television. Gah!! 6

There was someone from Crown Derby being interviewed this morning about their range of memorabilia for the royal wedding.

“Of course, tastes have changed since the last big royal wedding, so we have to keep up with new fashions.  For example, this time we’re including a range of wedding paper weights.“

Steady on there.

Breakfast Television. Gah!! 4

BBC Breakfast today had another “news” story about how another bloody recent study into childcare has proved that mothers with young children going back to work is terrible / fine (I switched over before I heard the outcome and all the same arguments re-hashed for the umpteenth time).  But the bit that made me “GAH!!” was the intro, in which the presenter did his serious face and said how mothers “agonise” over the decision.  This fits neatly with my theory, which is that it is now socially acceptable for mothers to either stay at home or go to work, as long as they feel like crap whatever they do.

Breakfast Television. Gah!! 2

I really need to come up with a better title if this is going to become a regular blog feature.

Article on GMTV this morning about putting babies in nurseries.  A new study has shown that it helps their development.  Or harms them irreparably.  It’s always one or the other.

Reporter – “I’m in such and such nursery, where they have several babies under two years old.  As a working mother myself, I know the heartache that each of the babies’ mothers must have felt when deciding to put them into a nursery.”

Right, so all the women must have been heartbroken.  It’s not possible that one or two of them might have wanted to go back to work and for the baby to be looked after by professionals and to feel happy about that decision.  They MUST feel guilty about it.  Just the mums of course,  not the dads.

Apparently the working mother v stay at home mother debate has progressed to the point where either option is acceptable, as long as the woman in question feels like crap.  She can go to work, but she must feel “heartache” for having left her child.  She’s not allowed to actually be quite cheerful about leaving her child in someone else’s care while she goes off to earn some cash and do grown up stuff.  No, no, no…it must be torture for her, or else she’s not a proper mother.

Breakfast Television. Gah!!

Every weekday I wake up to Radio 4 and then go downstairs and put the TV on while I eat my breakfast.  What I want is the TV equivalent of the Today programme.  What I get is a choice between BBC Breakfast and GMTV.  They are both so rubbish that I get exasperated with one, switch over to the other for five minutes until I get exasperated with that and so on, until it’s time to leave the house and I’m quite cross.

The main reason that I dislike them is that they are both so banal and treat their audiences like idiots. BBC Breakfast likes to dress up magazine-type stories as news and wheels out the same talking heads again and again to opine about them.  The presenters are specifically chosen for their blandness and talk to the audience like we’re a bit senile and liable to get upset if they don’t come out with platitudes and concerned expressions whether the story is about child abuse or wheelie bin collection.

If anything, I marginally prefer GMTV because at least the main focus is on showbiz stories so they’re not pretending to be something they’re not.  But when they do try to tackle a news story and the presenter who used to be a tennis player starts getting all self-righteous and talking about hard-working families or the nanny state, I want to throw up.  I know they’re only allocated a minute and a half per news item (although they’ll spend a good five minutes on the Jonas Brothers), but I hate it when they have some minister on to talk about a new initiative or something and they don’t even let them explain it first, they just start off saying “Isn’t this all just a waste of money that could be spent on our brave boys in Afghanistan / hard-working families / pensioners / nurses / guide dogs / fluffy bunnies.”  That’s not journalism, that’s just rude.  It might work when Jeremy Paxman asks a dismissive question, and you feel that there’s some intellectual weight behind it.  But Ben Shepherd et al can’t really pull off the same trick.

Anyway – rant over.  I’ve decided to amuse myself by posting some of the more stupid comments I hear.  That way, when they say something idiotic I will be exasperated, but also pleased that I will have something to blog about.  And that might make me slightly more cheerful in the mornings.

GMTV this morning

“Have you seen the state of Nick Clegg?  I don’t know what his wife Miriam has been doing – but she certainly hasn’t been ironing his shirts.”

It would improve the quality of my life enormously if I had the ability to make people on my tv spontaneously combust.