As people who know me will be reading this blog, I cannot be as brazen as to pretend that I'm not an unashamed watcher of the type of televisual pleasure I think we all love to hate.
Yep, I'm talking about reality TV.
A certain person with whom I share a flat has also recently managed to get me hooked on downloaded American reality TV, something I would have tried to deny all knowledge of a few years ago. However, when you're trying to save money to move house, downloaded TV (especially entire series of Buffy and House MD) cannot be knocked for its contribution to the cause.
But having been in bed for three days with a horrible tummy bug, I haven't been able to subject myself to the slick, multi-million dollar budget pleasures of downloaded episodes of The Apprentice USA, nor have I been watching in widescreen terrified Americans cooking at the mercy of Gordon Ramsay under custom-made LA studio lights. I was too late in the year even for the revolving-doored re-hash that was this year's UK Big Brother. No, I have been making do with watching antiques experts quizzing OAPs and teenage mothers on British park benches. It's what I like to call 'daytime surreality TV'. They do say the truth is stranger than fiction, and you can't get closer to the gritty truth of modern day society that a girl in a scrunchie and gold hoop earrings trying to sell a chipped china cat to a passing pensioner.
Now, I can vaguely appreciate these sorts of TV programmes on some level. They can come in useful if you have a good enough memory to know how to spot a £10,000 plate for 10p at a car boot sale. The concept of these shows cannot be knocked. It's the contestants who I have to watch through holes in my intertwined fingers.
Contestants on Big Brother and Shipwrecked know what they're doing. They've groomed themselves to the standards of the media they love to hound. They know how to stage a one-way conversation, allowing gaps for an over-emphasised Newcastle accent voiceover to be dubbed in before beginning their next remark. They've been prepped, primped and preened. They know what the viewers want to see. Daytime surreality TV doesn't have the benefit of these savvy show guests on its grimy gameshows. Daytime surreality can't even afford to book Joe Pasquale. No, daytime surreality has to make do with the real Joe Public.
One particularly bad antiques insight was on while I was still in bed this morning, too dazed from last night's painkillers to reach for the 'standby' button on my remote control. I think it was a segment of the Heaven and Earth Show. What would have been an interesting five minute piece was ruined not by the Mau-era Chinese Buddha figure that was brought onto the show, but by the woman who brought it on. The presenter could hardly get a word in - not because he was wading through this woman's pearls of wisdom, but because she wouldn't stop voicing her monotone agreement with his.
I could almost see the resentment bubbling up in the interviewer as his interviewee smothered all remnants of available silence with pointless droning mumbles of concurrence. "Yes", "Hmm", "Yes", "It is", "Yes", "Uh huh", "Yes", "Really?", er, YES!
I guess it's better than the chavvy crassness of the likes of Wife Swap, insomuch as at least I could understand what this woman was saying without using subtitles (though I'd ask someone to have me committed if I ever went to the bother of trying).
I think reality TV has encompassed so much of today's media, that some reality TV contestants have actually earned the right to feel superior over others. There's so much reality TV that the different levels are astounding.
The decision is starting to be made. I need to stay away from the fiction of slick big budget reality TV and even further away from the grittiness of daytime surreality TV.
Unfortunately I don't have time to write about the nodding-head dogs currently posing as interviewers on the Sky News channel.
