I’m going to admit to being an unabashed NCIS fan — the original, though the spin-offs have their moments, too. Sure, the show’s full of guns and shooting and dead bodies getting cut up on tables — all the usual good clean fun — but nobody takes it seriously. You’ve got the US presidential race for proper violence.
So Tuesday night I kicked back with a cup of tea and switched channels at 8.30pm. Not surprisingly the program prior to NCIS was still running. Okay, we all expect a bit of overlap.
I endured almost 40 minutes of the most risible television imaginable. A bunch of so-called ‘celebrities’, better described as washed-out hasbeens who obviously share Darren Lamb as a Media Agent (Ricky Gervais’ agent in Extras played by Stephen Merchant), have been dropped into a South African nature resort — sorry, I mean jungle — and take turns to sit in a diary room where they bleat bitterly about each other to the camera. Shane Warne looks like one of the puppet cast from Team America but without the strings, and Brendan Fevola clearly swallowed a lot of high calorie footballs in the latter stages of his career. Anthony, who won a talent content back in 1972 (roughly) and must have been plucked from behind a Burger King counter for this show, is just kind of confused all the time. While the women incarcerated in this hell-hole of deepest, darkest African tourism seem to have access to an extraordinary amount of cosmetics.
The only reason I didn’t hurl the TV remote at the screen in utter disgust at this puerile rubbish is that my wife did exactly that during last year’s footy season and we’ve installed a safety chain.
LEAVE LOATHING
After five minutes I hated the show. Ten minutes later I really, really hated it. By the time it finally stopped I not only loathed everything about the program, but out of principle I’ll never buy anything advertised during the broadcast — which was the same thing over and over again. Seriously, I’m practically taking notes on what commercials are run within the show to ensure I never purchase any of those products. The fact the show overran its scheduled time by nearly three quarters of an hour cheeses me off even further — that delay is forcing me to watch it. I’m told it ‘works’, subjecting two disparate audiences to those commercials (I fantasise running an AV presentation PA for TV executives and making the bastards wait an extra 30 minutes, before turning the microphones on — see how they like it).
Rubbing salt into the wound, while I’m watching my beloved NCIS the screen is constantly overlaid with promos for the same jungle camp crap, rekindling my rage for the program and everything associated with it.
Now we rewind back a few days to watching the more recent version of Total Recall. It’s almost sacrilegious to remake any film that had Arnie in it while he’s still alive and quoting, “I’ll be back”, but I’m happy to make an exception when you’ve got Kate Beckinsale and Jennifer Biel running around in wet singlets for the entire movie. Thanks to Blade Runner we’re all convinced that Earth in a couple of decades will suffer constant rain — and wall-to-wall digital signage. The whole world is absolutely chockers with gigantic screens advertising everything to everybody. Assuming that Cat5 has gone the same way as curly telephone cords, it’s gotta be wireless. You reckon the wireless bandwidth is cluttered now? Next century you’ll be able to cut it with a knife as a zillion digital signage screens deliver a zillion messages.
BETTER LATTE THAN NEVER
Okay, we’re talking about two entirely different mediums and one of them is completely fictional (no, not the mental holidays on Mars thing), but you might agree they both are a digital sign of what things have come to (don’t excuse the pun, it’s clever). The belief that blanket, unrelenting exposure to the same product is still a good idea and doesn’t risk an adverse impact — TV remote control chucking or the world’s population developing a ‘10m stare’ that doesn’t see a single screen anywhere — even when we’re confronted with an entire cityscape of advertising.
How can we fix the problem? I’ve got this idea for a new telly show. We dump a dozen advertising and television executives into a secret camp in the middle of Fitzroy or Surry Hills so they can smell the caffé lattes and short blacks, but never get one. No access to pubs, restaurants or sushi bars either. They’re surrounded by an impenetrable barrier of television monitors that endlessly repeat the same few commercials and there’s an enormous pile of remote controls stacked in the centre of the camp. It’ll be called, I’m an advertising dude, get me out of here!. Everyone has to survive 10 days without hurling anything at the monitors.
I’ll give ‘em 24 hours before everybody gets evicted.
Mug Punter is a proper writer and novelist; get him outta here.
Mug Punter’s curmudgeonly carping does not necessarily reflect the views of DigitalSignage. If you have a differing view contact the editor Chris Holder.