So long overnight TV

Apparently, broadcasting programmes through the night costs the BBC £150m a year. So, in order to meet its target of 20% cuts, director general Mark Thompson has warned that the corporation could be forced to take a major channel off air overnight. And this is supposed to put the wind up us? Whenever anyone mentions cuts, either to the arts or public services, well-meaning folks feel obliged to groan and wail and gnash. But this sounds like a brilliant idea to me, quite apart from the money-saving aspect. I mean, why not turn telly off overnight? Closedown is, or was, one of those old-fashioned, late-night rituals that wormed its way into our culture, like listening to the shipping forecast. The test card was another, with its sinister grinning clown and that nice girl stuck in a geometric no-place, condemned to play – or not play – noughts and crosses for ever. Such things, when they go, are rightly missed. One of the important things about telly was that sometimes it stopped. We can feel nostalgia for the sour-sweet satisfactions of the cathode ray tube whining down to a faint white dot, then a spectral after-image, before vanishing altogether. But, in the plasma age, we can’t really hope to get that back. Those hours of dead air afterwards, on the other hand – that’s something we can all still aspire to. There used to be a mysterious and melancholy atmosphere to late-night TV: a sense that you had stumbled into a world that ordinary people weren’t really meant to see. All those Open University professors, for instance, with wide brown ties and spectacles made of Bakelite. But the key thing was you didn’t expect it to be on. It felt – well, not transgressive exactly, but different in character than, say, the 6pm-10pm slots. Now that everything is on 24 hours a day (and by “everything” I mean CSI: Miami and Late Night Poker), the magic has gone. Who’s watching that telly anyway? Twentysomethings rattling with drugs, thirtysomethings slumped in alcoholic stupors, fortysomething insomniacs with eyes like stab wounds, and elderly people who are, well, just sort of afraid to fall asleep. Not the most attentive of audiences. For most people, watching telly at 4am is what you might call “passive television watching”. It is the TV-watching you do when you have tipped over the point at which going to bed is, in defiance of all the laws of common sense, actually more of an effort than watching another half-hour of telly. Again, most people would only be watching TV at that time of night if sticking something on Sky+ or iPlayer was too much of a pain. By that stage you are, effectively, one of the living dead. By that stage, the telly is watching you. The point has been made to me that, were closedown to be reinstated, the major losers would be the deaf, since much of the wee small hours are dedicated to the Sign Zone, where programmes are rescreened with signing accompaniment. Fair point. But I don’t think it’s an insuperable objection. Among other things, why should the deaf have to lose sleep? The

Posted by on March 27, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.