I am lucky to live in part of the country where we only have four terrestrial TV channels and digital reception is poor: who wants hundreds of channels of drivel when four is sufficient? Well, lots of people do, and your idea of drivel and mine are probably different. But looking idly at a TV guide this morning over breakfast, I was struck by the programme titles on a couple of satellite channels, all clamouring loudly for my three-minute attention span:
- Battle Stations, Battlefield Detectives, Great Crimes and Trials, Vanishings, Mega Disasters, In the Grip of Evil, Conversations with Killers, Cold Case Files, ...
- Real NCIS, Battlefront, Deep Jungle, Megastructures, Seconds from Disaster, One Year On, America's Hardest Prisons: Supermax, ...
Without being familiar with the content of the channels, I think you might find it rather hard to guess which was which: in fact, 1 is the History Channel and 2 is National Geographic.
My point is that by going for such needlessly sensationalist (and also undescriptive) titles, whoever thinks up the titles is not only underestimating the intelligence and discrimination of viewers, but also devaluing language: if everything has to be so "wow, look at me, I'm so exciting" - what words are left for things that really are significant and should be attention-getting? It's a bit like using the F word all the time in conversation (or your blog!), then having nothing satisfying to say when you hit your thumb with a hammer.
11/09/06 @ 12:41