Don’t knock daytime TV, says Lloyd Evans. It may be mindless and banal, but it is entertainment in its purest form
It’s happening right now. I just had a flick-through and it’s all going on. You wouldn’t believe it. A Labrador called Pongo has been squashed by a tractor and is having his broken paw fixed at the vet. A grandmother from Dartford is trying to raise funds for her daughter-in-law’s wedding by auctioning a trunkload of heirlooms. And Mandy and Oona (in the blue), are hoping to make a bigger profit at the car-boot sale than Vaughan and Sanjay (in the red). It’s gripping stuff, take my word for it. If you work in an office, the world of daytime TV may not have crossed your consciousness, but if your sitting room is also your workplace, as mine is, then the little grey square in the corner is a constant temptation. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is.
When I take a break to get my mid-morning news-hit from Sky I invariably find myself glancing curiously towards the low-attention channels and their treasure-house of fake rivalries and invented challenges. Once I start watching something during the day I have to force myself to stop. Literally, I have to deliver an ultimatum. ‘Switch off after five minutes.’ But why? With evening TV it’s the other way round. I invariably find myself reluctantly deciding to ‘stick with’ some earnest documentary about separating conjoined twins or teaching orangutans to use sign language or traversing Panama with a coracle to prove that the Irish discovered Hawaii. The difference is that the evening is officially assigned to relaxation so watching TV, being permissible, seems less attractive. During the day, however, I’m supposed to be working so the telly is invested with the delicious aroma of transgression.
But there’s something else going on. Daytime TV shows are extremely proficient at what they do. Thirty years ago daytime telly scarcely existed and it now flourishes as a vast international industry that offers gold-mine rewards for successful operators. It requires skill, hard work, and not a little ingenuity to devise a winning format. Before the makeover show became a trusted genre, it must have taken some daring, and even a dash of visionary genius, to realise that the simple act of decorating a house could make entertaining TV. Now labelled ‘creality television’, this contrived type of documentary has proliferated into a thousand varieties: auctioning your house, starting a business, nursing a sick pet, migrating to Spain, migrating back from Spain. Every type of domestic drama has been sucked up by the eager TV producers and fed back to a nation of dozing zombies.
There are numerous objections to this sort of TV. It’s artless and banal, it’s shallow and forgettable. It encourages us to follow other people’s lives at the cost of neglecting our own. It appeals to audiences at the nadir of their mental capacity: zonked housewives, hungover students, tagged burglars, mashed junkies, arthritic nonagenarians, jobless bankers and underemployed hacks. The best it can do is to illuminate the limitations of our existence and reflect back to us our own irrelevance and pettiness.
Yes, absolutely. Correct on every point. Yet none of those objections can quite demolish the counter-argument that daytime TV offers a terrific form of slack-brained entertainment and if you’ve got 25 minutes to spare in mid-afternoon, there’s nothing better than to introduce yourself to Patricia, the world-famous dog-whisperer, and watch as she tries to use sound-aversion therapy to prevent Cha-Cha the dachshund from biting the baby. The alleged ‘defects’ of these shows are the very qualities that make them outstanding. They don’t seek to grip, shock or stimulate. They never offer total absorption or thrill-a-minute entertainment. That wouldn’t work. A daytime show must enfold the attention with a light grasp and offer a slender storyline that can survive the odd interlude as the viewer rises from the sofa to soothe a roused baby, replenish the gin tumbler or swat a bluebottle with the travel section of the Daily Telegraph.
And despite the low ambitions of these shows I’m always amazed how rapidly my sympathies can be enlisted by some evolving conflict or drama. One minute I know nothing of Maureen and her mission to turn a derelict terrace in Stoke into a glorious three-bedroom home and sell it for a whopping profit, but once I’ve grasped the details I’m cheering on Maureen and everything she does and I’m wishing death on the feckless team of workmen who keep pestering her with groundless complaints and ordering the wrong sort of pipes and sneaking off for a fag. How can my loyalties be engaged so cheaply? That I’m shallow and suggestible is an obvious explanation but there may be a more universal cause at work here — the craving for stories.
Something deep inside us longs to trace the simple but uncertain route-map again and again: the problem, the quest for answers, the last-minute reversal and the solution. This is the model on which every dramatic genre is based, from the highest to the lowest, from Oedipus Rex to the three-card-trick. And daytime TV offers us this model in ceaseless profusion and it does so without the least attempt to conceal its pre-fabricated superficiality. It arrives in our homes untainted by the educational grandeurs that spoil so much factual programming. It has no desire to inform. It couldn’t care less about explaining anything. It’s not interested in how clever or stupid or bored or idle we might be. It knows we need diversion and it happily obliges. It’s not art for art’s sake. It’s crap for crap’s sake and a good thing too. It’s a source of entertainment that’s as pure and plain and unspun as a glass of water.
And the world of daytime formats is itself… oh, hang on: just got to check something. Right. Bad news, I’m afraid. The new boiler’s bust, the plumber’s in Spain and Maureen’s got to have the house on the market next week. I thought that might happen. Now, where was I? Yes, the world of daytime formats is itself a never-ending story. There are huge profits to be made for a producer who can crack the right formula and British companies are currently leading the pack. UK firms own a larger slice of the world’s TV format market (41 per cent) than anyone else. And the recession hasn’t made the slightest dent to their profitabil-ity. Perversely, the slump may even be helping because the more vegetables there are lined up on the sofa the happier the marketing men get. Even the skint and the jobless need to buy the sort of products (‘FMCG’ as they’re called the trade — fast moving consumer goods) which advertisers want to aim at the watching telly-jellies.
So if you’ve got a teenage slacker at home this summer who seems a little reluctant to raise his sleepy gaze from Animal Rescue Squad or Homes Under the Hammer, you shouldn’t necessarily disturb him. He may be conducting vital research through those half-closed eyes. And come the autumn he may be heading for London — currently the Athens of no-brain television — to make his fortune as a format millionaire. One word of advice. Don’t join him on the sofa. You may never get up again.