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27 June 2013

It’s finally acceptable to cast off the shackles of TV snobbery

Who knows, Bim Adewunmi might even give the next series Big Brother a go.

By Bim Adewunmi

Oh, I don’t watch Big Brother.” A harmless admission, right? It looks like a simple statement of telly preference, a brief glimpse into the personal habits and quirks a person has formed over years of watching the box in the corner.
 
But lurking behind those words is an unasked question, hanging invisibly at the end of that sentence. It is laced with mild incredulity and it goes a little something like, “But you do?!” You know what that is? That’s basic telly snobbery and we all engage in it.
 
Before you begin to protest a little too strenuously, take a hard look at yourself. If you watch television, you will have a show that you love, a show that you hate and a show that you’re a snob about. Come on. I’ll start with one trio that fits: I love The Good Wife; I hate Britain’s Got Talent and I look down on Big Brother (and all those who watch it). There is always a programme on the air that we feel is the very nadir of human civilisation, an insult to the riches that technology has brought to our lives, a waste of time and effort and a stain on the televisual landscape. That’s TV snobbery at its finest and don’t you deny it.
 
Television is a tribal medium. Clear evidence springs up in our own lives: the adults who were not allowed to watch ITV as children, because it was “common”, what with its advertisements and sense of fun. Or those of us who will not watch Coronation Street until forced to by extended family consensus at Christmas. Or even those people who exclusively watch box sets of HBO dramas that feature lashings of sex and black comedy and death. You pick your tribe and stick with it, because it is deft shorthand for the person you are, or perhaps the person you want to be (or be seen as). If you watch the Elmore Leonard adaptation of Justified, what does that say about you? If you love a nerdcom such as The Big Bang Theory, what are you projecting to the world? If you enjoy Sex and the City so much that you unashamedly call yourself a “total Carrie” in real-life situations, what is the world supposed to think?
 
I once worked alongside a man who very proudly and somewhat sniffily told me that he didn’t watch television. He said it – just like that – in that practised way that suggested to me that he had come to expect an awed gasp and a request to elaborate on his charming quirk.
 
So I obliged him – why, I asked, do you hate fun? And he gave the usual spiel that people like him give: oh, there’s never anything good on, I’d rather read a book and let my imagination soar free, it rots your brain and stunts your mental growth . . . On he went, ad nauseum, emphasis on the “nauseam”.
 
I thought about arguing the point – there I sat, an avid viewer of television, having imbibed hours of it a day every day since I was a child, and I was no less engaged in the world, no more stunted than any child of the 1980s, holding down jobs and paying taxes – but then I saved my breath. If you don’t want television, I thought, then television doesn’t want you.
 
And that sentiment is largely true of the programmes I (and you) hate. They’re not specifically looking for you, hankering after you to love and adore them. Television as it was in the days of one channel, then two, then five channels is gone, replaced by hundreds of channels, DVR (digital video recorders) and PVR (personal video recorders) and the king of bingeing, the box set. Shows are finding their audiences and growing with them, content to have found one at all. Nobody is really pushing to the front, shouting “like me, like me!”
 
In turn, that frees us to watch more things and cast off the shackles of the TV snobbery. Every autumn for the last few years, I’ve found myself engaging in energetic bouts of tweeting about the singing competition, The X Factor. I used to get a few people expressing surprise, mild dismay and disappointment when they saw my tweets but that’s largely stopped now; I’m allowed to like Frasier and The X Factor. Earlier this week, I watched the former contestant Rylan Clark presenting Big Brother’s Bit On The Side. My snobbery was no contest for his charm – the guy was no singer, but as a presenter? Boy, can he work a room.
 
Who knows, next series maybe I’ll give Big Brother a go after all. Another one bites the dust.
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