Sex, Lies and Videotape

I see that the former head of Channel 4 is getting all upset because he thinks that his old channel is getting all obsessed with sex because they are going to be showing a programme about willies sometime later this month. Hang on - wasn't this the man that brought us the "Little red triangle" series of late night arty subtitled films with a bit of boob and bum on show and stuck a red triangle in the corner to "warn" us that the movie had some sex in it which only served to (a) wind up Mary Whitehouse and (b) cause people like me to try and watch some inpenetrable piece of dadaist filmmaking in the hope of catching a flash of tit? Hey at lest they used to commission some very good pieces of TV about sex - "Pornography - A Secret History" and the documentary on Zoophilia spring to minds as two examples (only cos' I saw these pop up on one of the satellite channels recently). At least these were insightful, intellegent, treated the viewer as though they posessed an average collection of grey matter and you went away feeling that you had at least learnt something.

If Jeremy Isaacs wants to have a pop at Channel 4 he might start with why their programming now seems to cater for the IQ of 80 and attention span of a goldfish with altzheimers demographic. Two examples present themselves, starting with the new series "Codex" shown on sunday evenings. Me and Mrs Dracunculus thought we'd give this a go "OK so it's a game show and it looks like it's designed to cash in on the cacky book by that Brown guy but Tony Robinson's doing it and it's in the British Museum so it might be a interesting."

Wrong! What we get is "Here is the Standard of Ur, it's really, really old and we're giving you the privalege of standing closer than the public ever get (dimbulb contenstants proceed to gawk at artefact for a few seconds before working out the figures don't move or sing Britney Spears songs and is therefore not interesting) so now we're going to play... spot the difference!" The "codex" turns out a simple substitution cypher which I'd solved in my head using basic frequency analysis (the fact they'd left the apostrophies in made life a bit easier) by the time the second set of clues were given; you really would have to be a complete moron not to get this - fortunately the team playing only had one complete moron, a "part time model" who thought the total length of the Tigris was 190km. Jesus wept - this was truly, truly pitiful and I cannot for the life of me think who would want to watch this. I mananged to stick the car-crash out to the end but can think of more interesting things to do with a sunday evening - like watch paint dry.

Then monday we get served with a documentary in which C4's researchers rounded up the most rabid bunch of little englanders, xenophobes and racists they could find (within 20 minutes of Horseferry Road presumably - they were on a budget), let them spout on for a few minutes on what you have to be to be English (which prediciably came down essentially to "be white") and then they gave them a DNA test which showed their genetic makeup to be from all over the place with a preponderance of south eastern European (apart from the idiot woman who claimed you couldn't be English unless your family predated the "genocide" of William the Conqueror - tactfully glossing over the fact that the Angles and Saxons didn't exactly wander into a vacant country and maybe that nasty business with those Romans - and who turned out to be 100% romany gypsy and then promptly tried to sue the producers for calling her a pikey). The thing was this was really lazy television, a "let's have a laff at the racists" hour. No attempt was made to explain or explore why it was that these folk who did have British born ancestors turn out to have DNA from all over Europe if not the world (the clue is in those Romans and Normans (guess where the Goths* ended up settling after sacking Rome) coming over chaps). Nope, all we got was "have a gawp, feel a bit of schadenfreude as the bigots get shown up on the telly, feel superior about yourself and go to bed".

Quite franky, get rid of this sort of crap and replace it with something that doesn't treat me like a remedial pupil and you can have all the programmes on bums and willies you like.



* that's Goths as in "Aleric the..." not "Sullen youth wearing black pixie boots and listening to Fields of the Nephilim".