The Regression of TV.
I get really fed up with paying for my television licence because there is such a terrible choice of programmes. The fee for a year’s TV is not exactly on the cheap side, although I wouldn’t begrudge paying it if there were a few decent things to watch. How did it all go so wrong? Years ago there was always something good to watch on the box, but now we are largely limited to ‘reality TV’, talent shows and sexed-up, Botox ridden American Buffy-esque style vampire dramas.
Over the last few weeks, I have slowly been wading my way through all 118 episodes of ‘The Saint’. Yeah, it’s dated (I’m still watching the black and white ones) but it always had a really clever story to it. The acting was good and it was full of amusing one-liners. Besides, Roger Moore was just so damn smooth as Simon Templar.
Television had some brilliant shows back then; ‘The Avengers’, ‘The Invaders’, ‘Danger Man’ and ‘The Prisoner’. Even Dr Who was a better programme than it is now. It’s really sad that everything had to change so much. We may not have had eye-popping special effects back then, but the shows were still superior. There was far more emphasis on story and acting rather than what could be done with CGI’s.
We also did not have this current obsession with graphic sex and violence in everything. Today’s soaps would never have been aired back then, let alone the present day’s post-watershed programmes. Characters still shot and bedded one another, but we didn’t need to see the finer details. Imagination ruled in the sixties and early seventies.
Unfortunately, the only way we can get to see many of those old classics from the television of yesteryear is by buying them on DVD. This is because many of them are no longer even repeated in today’s schedules.
So, call me a boring old fuddy-duddy, but I will stick with Templar. And when I have seen all 118 I shall move on to something else. There are certainly plenty of brilliant shows to see from back then.
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