Has TV turned us into monsters?
Should we agree with Fay Weldon writing in yesterday’s Sunday Times ? Essentially she was writing about Channel 4’s The Family which started last Wednesday but really she was just having a bit of a rant against TV in general.
Weldon argues - indeed, she seems convinced - that TV has turned us from “dignified, courteous individuals into solipsistic, complacent monsters who feel free to shout, swear, hug and emote as caprice takes us”. She says that reality TV along with gritty drama from Grange Hill to EastEnders has turned us - presumably the British public, but perhaps all westerners - into a highly negative, detestable lot. “Once an unselfconscious species, we have become self-aware,” she writes.
Basically, Weldon doesn’t like what she sees on The Family. The family’s behaviour isn’t even real, it’s set-up because they know they’re being filmed and have even let the cameras into the marital bedchamber (the eight-part series follows a family of six supposedly living their normal lives, much like Paul Watson’s original fly-on-the-wall family documentary series did in 1974).
But does she have a point about the media and TV in particular being responsible for all of societies evils and a supposed collapse in modern-day morals and manners?
I tend to resist talk of the media’s culpability in changing society for the worse for two reasons. One is that I work in the media and don’t generally want to condemn my peers. The other is that I’m reluctant to join the ranks of old fogey, Golden agers who think everything was fine and dandy when they were young up until they turned about 40 since which time everything’s gone to the dogs. This sort of thinking has been around, amongst people of a certain age, forever and is a sad side-effect of growing old.
But pondering this weekend on a different, but possibly related issue - the fraught and perhaps unanswerable question of whether women resented domestic drudgery more, less or about the same 50 years ago, when they generally got married earlier, had children in their 20s and had no great expectations in life particularly of a career - I found myself saying that perhaps one of the reasons that so many 30-something mothers I know are reluctant housewives, trying to be a perfect mother and partner while still wanting some professional stimulation and reward and generally getting their knickers in a twist as a result, perhaps that is because the media has helped feed us the idea that there are women out there who “have it all”.
Then I check myself and remember that some women have always bemoaned their lot. My own grandmother hugely resented the fact that her somewhat Victorian father wouldn’t allow her to go to university. Literature is full of female characters who rail against the constraints of traditionally limited female roles.
I think I do believe that art, culture and the media generally hold a mirror up to life rather than create it - which isn’t to say the media doesn’t have a huge influence on society at the same time. It’s all a bit complicated, which doesn’t go down well with the “blame on the newspapers/television” brigade.
British society has got progressively less stuffy in the last 50 years and in many ways that’s no bad thing. But to say that road rage, knife crime or the unprecedented displays of public grief over the death of Princess Diana are a result of television is a bit too easy. I’d need to see stats, at the very least, about violent crime on the streets of London when Dickens was writing or know more about how the public greeted the deaths of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria before drawing any conclusions.