Rubbish. Is it better in HD?

Many moons ago now, I can remember when we got our first TV at home. It was a Bush, weighed a ton and had a 12in screen. My mum and dad bought it for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Of course, it would have been wonderful to have seen that pageant in glorious colour but at that time colour TV was a long way off and we had to watch in black & white. Nevertheless, and in spite of the tiny screen, we thought it was marvellous. We only had one channel from the BBC and there was no commercial TV. But then the other channels appeared and we had 3 or 4 for many years. Then came colour. A friend who had retired now found himself glued to the new colour TV but complained that a lot of the programmes were rubbish - but they were better in colour. I have almost similar feelings today when we have dozens of channels all in glorious colour. We have wide screen plasma and projection TVs that can provide us with huge pictures in HD format - the cinema in the living room. But I don't think the programmes are better in wide screen format. They are when the programmes are good but, unfortunately, in spite of lots of channels, there is still a lot of rubbish on TV. In fact, it is so difficult to provide good quality programmes for so many channels that buckets of rubbish and lots of repeats to fill in the time are almost inevitable. But there is so much that is really dire. Acres and acres of soap operas - how can anybody watch this stuff night after night, week in and week out; the producers dreaming up every more fantastic story lines to keep the things going - and still they are rubbish. Then there are all the talent shows, celebrity dancing, skating, singing - God help is - all dire stuff. Weird documentaries for minority audiences that are specialised to the point of invisibility. Pop singers to opera - what was that all about? Good pop-singers become pub singers. The programme companies tell us that they are trying to attract a younger audience. Why? It's pensioners who watch TV. And if the programmes were not bad enough, there are the adverts for products that I will never buy; hours and hours of adverts. Programmes that were originally made by the BBC to last for 30 minutes, now last for 40 minutes because there are 10 minutes added on for the bloody adverts. And the channels line themselves up so that you cannot slip off to another channel rather than watch the adverts. All the channels put their adverts on at the same time. And it becomes clear that the whole purpose of the programmes is to fill in the gaps between adverts - and so the programmes don't matter anymore - as long as they can get high spending young people to watch the adverts. Am I a cynic? Yes!

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