Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

It never rains but it pours!

24 August 2023 ~ Britain a nice place to live on the telly

As coronavirus begins to look more and more like an unsolved crime, leaving many people wondering if they should really have had those jabs, and now that the conflict in Ukraine has passed its media sell-by date, thanks mainly to the British public’s notorious attention-span deficit, the climate-warming bandwagon has taken to the road again, strapped to which is a dubious sidecar, artificial intelligence. Billed by UK media as the greatest threat to humanity since Britain’s extended opening hours (licensed premises or the country’s borders?), an arguably greater threat to us all than artificial intelligence must surely be our national failure to use the intelligence with which we were born when defining our relationship with truth and what we see on the telly.

You might ask what I, the Chairman of the TV Temperance Society, is doing sitting in front of the telly, and you would be right to do so. The answer is simple: During my recent tour of duty here in the UK, my predicament is one in which I have found myself exposed, and not infrequently, to the TV set of a friend, who, for reasons only known to himself, insists on ‘catching the news’.

Catching the news in the UK is a little like catching coronavirus, catching the adverts is worse, the only difference being that those we never believed or trusted before the onset of coronavirus and anti-Brexit hype, and whom we believe and trust a whole lot less in hindsight, have no desire to protect us from these twin pestilences with a vaccine false or otherwise. Thus, when we watch the news, or watch anything on British TV, it is our own immune system, our God-given common sense, in which we must rely, not Big Pharma.

I must say (why?) that having not ‘watched telly’ for a considerable period of time, 17 years in fact, from a purely academic perspective, the experience is quite an interesting one. For example, take the conmercials.

As well as attempting to persuade us to buy something and/or fork out for a service that we do not need and would better do without, TV adverts have become an integral part of the media’s, and by default the British Government’s, perpetual drive to convince us that all is hunky dory; that the UK has at last become the happy, harmonic multicultural melting pot that Enoch Powell predicted it could never be. To a lesser extent, yet creeping through the woke back door left open, LGBTQ is also ideologically embedded in British TV advertising, suggesting that all to a man are firmly behind the movement … so to speak.

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this, in fact it is essential, dramatically essential, that however disingenuous the product they are pushing, we are willing to buy into it. As it happens (thank you Jim!), we really have no choice. Having made our multicultural bed without the permission of due democratic process, it is the job of our string-pulled political classes to make sure that we quietly lie in it … innit!

Britain a Nice Place to Live on the Telly

So, there is an awful lot more foreigners floating around in the adverts than there was when I last watched television 17 years ago. The people pecking order is blacks first, then Asians and here and there the odd oriental, which, again, is fine, in the sense that, like it or not, this is where we are at in modern-day Britain, give or take a few Albanians and also half of Ukraine.

At a cursory glance, for example over the top of your mobile phone, the inference could be that it is a red letter and rainbow day for the concept of inclusivity. But look again; all is not well. The British-on-paper-only folk, as distinct from Britons by lineage, are not stereotyped by characteristics universally associated with who they are and where they hail from, all of which would be jolly liberal if not for the ironic fact that the TV remodelled version is more like ‘us’ than we are ourselves.

Becoming ‘more like us’ is a strange, strangely controversial and also amusing phenomenon, why? Because nobody on our TV adverts and nobody’s lifestyle as portrayed on TV bears the slightest resemblance to ‘us’ ~ to our lifestyles, to what we think, to what we say and the way we feel, least of all to what we think and feel about our reconstituted, repackaged country.

Britain a nice place to live on the telly

TV adverts would have us believe, and it is make-believe pure and simple, that everyone in the UK inhabits a star-spangled realm where, regardless of background and ethnicity, we are middle-class, upwardly mobile, swanking it up in des-res properties (warm and with the lights all blaring, and don’t forget incessantly grinning, irrespective of soaring utility costs ), united by shared cultural values and generally ‘’avin’ it large” together. Naturally unnaturally, this televised illusion of what and who as a nation we are is complete and utter fiction, but when all is said and done the fiction is a nice one.

‘Nice’ is something that in my absence, British TV has almost mastered. Not entirely, however, as it continues to churn out sleazy, violent, tacky programmes, front and centre of which are a plethora of films and dramas which, in the days before life went virtual, would never have got past the censor. But cut through the sleaze and primeval viciousness, the woke blancmange and PC tripe, and the overall impression is (please sing along together now) ‘we all live in a rainbow submarine’. It is finely tuned, perfectly balanced, well-adjusted and ~ this is the all-important bit ~ effortlessly inclusive.

This kudos, or a fair proportion of it, must be ascribed to the hand-picked newsreaders and the sterling performance they give. My favourites, but then I am bias because of my personal, historic connections with Norwich, are those nice people who present Anglia Regional News. A more affable bunch of English people you would be very hard-pushed to find, especially off the telly ~ think needle in a haystack. How could you not help warm to them, this rare and endangered species?

Admittedly, it does not harm Norwich any that its geographic location puts a fair distance between it and some of our country’s less salubrious cities and that the Norfolk and Suffolk regions are some of the finest examples of Englishness the nation has yet to lose. Thus, give or take the odd exception ~ since the country as a whole is nowhere near as nice as the make-believe one served up on the box and certainly not as safe and stable ~ the news from rural regions can often be more palatable than the horror seeping daily out from those manky NO-GO Areas, which, we are officially told, do not exist in Britain. Stand by to ‘pull the other one’!

Another feather in the media’s illusory cap (Do you recognise it? It hangs down limply with bells on.) are, without question, the weather forecasters. This little band of interluders, are such a welcome breath of fresh air ~ even when it isn’t windy ~ that they can make the weather in Britain seem nice when in fact it has not stopped piddling with rain since summer was announced.

Torrential rain, gale-force winds, perpetually overcast skies, temperatures like the arctic, however bad it may be, our presenters keep on smiling. Land heaves, earthquakes, asteroid apocalypse, whatever the state of play (Look up! It’s a nuclear strike!) the face of the British weather forecaster always wears a smile.

And this is as right as alright can be, because in a country the social stability of which grows more precarious day by day, a country in which it is virtually impossible to stay in a hotel without sharing a room with an Albanian drug dealer, a country where the political classes are more obsessed with woke than ensuring safety on the streets, a country in which its police force says ‘blame it on your politicians’, a country where no one dare switch on the heating since the cost of gas and electric has spiralled out of control, a country where millions of pounds are squandered on financing futile conflicts in faraway lands which are none of its business, especially whilst legacy Britons sleep rough on our streets and the NHS is imploding due to egregious immigration indifference, more than ever before we, as a nation, are in dire need of solace, comfort and reassurance from the traction-gaining realisation that it is all going terribly wrong and that if we continue on the present trajectory it can only get much worse.

If television can work a miracle and make our country feel ‘nice’, then no matter how it does it, the BBC could honestly say, ~ if it remembers how to honestly say ~ that the risk of not paying your TV licence is worth the money it costs them to keep sending investigation letters that the world and its wife ignores.

I myself believe, however, that apart from being a very bad habit, lack of funds to do anything else and the exhaustion that naturally accrues from the daily lot of a wage slave, the flawed mentality of those who incessantly watch the box and take it all as gospel lies somewhere between ‘Don’t touch that dial!’ and TV’s shining, happy people.

Nice to see you, to see you nice, but anything more than that is so far from the truth as to make it powder-keg dangerous.

Here comes the intermission! Best go and make a cup of tea.