Someone asked me the other day if
I was watching Glue, the latest British by-the-numbers crime drama. I replied ‘no’ curtly quickly moving the
conversation on lest I damage their sensibilities with a diatribe about how formulaic
and predictable television drama has become and putting them off me for life.
Not that such a thing bothers me – I like to see people’s faces scrunch up when
I enter a room, or hear that they have left the country to avoid me, but in
this instance I was prepared to spare their feelings. You see, TV schedulers seem to be under the
impression that we are all obsessed with the antics of teenagers, and how they
are some kind of social barometer for all of us.
I can see why some might get
caught up in the maelstrom and start believing it, having been spoon fed a diet
of Beverly Hills 90210 (which has
since dropped the Beverly Hills bit, as it sounded too grown up), Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, and countless Australian mental-fodder shows, all of which deign
to show adolescents as righteous, upright citizens rather than the solvent
sniffing, murderous, thieving scumbags that many are. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that all
teenagers are like that, but a large majority are, and endless reruns of Gilmore Girls or Little House on the Prairie aren’t going to make them any better.
The one mould-breaker is the
British offering, Hollyoaks which portrays
life north of Liverpool in a realistic documentary kinda way rather than adding
an overly sweet icing. I have a kind of
fascination with Hollyoaks – the only
show on TV where everyone’s parents were only ten years old when they had their
own kids and two generations occupy just 28 years age space. I can actually believe this as I’m told that
most people north of Watford (it’s a place in England) leaves school at 11 and immediately
go on to have several snot-nosed offspring which they then abandon, only to
return eighteen years later in the hope of forgivness, but only to become a
thorn in their children’s side. Actually
I can imagine that last bit is not only true, but de rigour in Northern England,
where barmaids eat their young.
And now we have teen drama
infesting post-watershed time in the form of a whodunit set in idyllic countryside. Personally, I couldn’t give a damn which one
of the whiney, self-obsessed teenagers murder which other one, and the whole
thing won’t impact on my life, but apparently the show has hit the rating, just
proving that there are plenty around less discerning than me, so the networks
are likely to be searching for more of this kind of dross to fill their
allotted hours with, which is bad news for all of us.
Glue? I really would
rather be watching paint dry!
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