In the last days of Hey Hey It's Saturday, my estimable colleague, Mr Wilde, and I were loafing in the wings during an ad break. Sweating and groaning, the staging crew rushed large pieces of scenery back and forth through the big doors to reset the studio for the next segment.
"They say you should be nice to the people you meet on the way up because you'll meet them again on the way down," Wilde loudly announced. "Anyway, how are all you guys doing?" They ignored us. They were racing the clock in a five minute window, in a live TV show.
Nobody sets their watch to the television, and yet it is still broadcast in family-sized half hour blocks, an anachronism that dates from a time when programmes were relayed across the country along coaxial cables. An hour of television never was. It was 50 minutes then each local car dealer would break into the programme, with split-second switch-timing, to deliver his personal message.
There was an oddity in the early days of cable TV, the "interstitial". Programmers still slaved to the big hand on the clock, but without advertisements commissioned five-minute programmes to fill up the hour, like the comic at a strip club keeping the crowd going while the next performer gets ready.
Around the same time as I worked in the weekly, two hour gang-show, I remarked to one of the segment producers, as we stood outside the big doors of the big studio, that we would one day be able to say that we were there at the Twilight of the Studio System.
It was intended as mock self-importance, an allusion to Hollywood of the1950s and yet ... decades later, the solar system of a handful of channels has expanded into pinpricks of light streaming in from every corner of the universe and an abundance of dark matter.
Shows are now either minutes shorter or days longer. When fast broadband is shilled, promising business efficiency, it is largely the business of moving pictures that becomes more efficient. Google and Apple are selling shovels on the way to the goldfields and alongside the odd nugget there are a billion flecks of sparkly nothing.
While services like iView promise time-shifting, they also allow time contraction. An unexpected consequence of streaming is that the rule of the broadcaster's clock disappears. A five-minute programme may suit better than an hour. The Katering Show and Soul Mates waste less time. It's also a useful out-of-town try-out. If it works well enough, then glue a bunch together and call it sketch comedy.
At the other pole, you can name a show that has been recommended as artful, intelligent and compelling and yet you are not prepared to spend the wasted weeks of your own life living someone else's imaginary one. Westworld's season has ended like salted peanuts demanding more consumption. Game of Thrones is outstripping George R.R. Martin's capacity to write the books of its origin. House of Cards has been trumped.
I have recently developed a taste for shows that have a timely resolution, an endpoint, rather than a business plan of production years. Black Mirror (Netflix) fulfils this constraint but it's very black and that's you in the mirror. It is set in the present, as all sci-fi is. The urban myth that Orwell's 1984 was originally titled 1948 has a resonance. That's why the myth took.
I watched the first episode with a friend. I thought it was hilarious; she was too traumatised to watch it ever again. I pressed on alone and bailed out of a subsequent episode because I could see that it was going somewhere deeply unpleasant yet inescapably true.
Art spans the spectrum from degustation, where the chef knows best, to fast food, the exploitation of your base urges. Black Mirror is degustation and contains the same hazards as a celebrated restaurant with the iconoclast chef. Your distaste will be challenged.
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