Saturday, February 02, 2013

Wow, brilliant, amazing, wow!

This morning, Mary Anne Hobbs played "Windowlicker" on her 6 Music show and I decided that it was time to not listen to Mary Anne Hobbs anymore. Not because she played "Windowlicker", but because she introduced it by saying that the great thing about 6 Music is that it's so brilliant because you can play "Windowlicker" at ten to nine on a Saturday morning, and where else could you do that (I don't know, Mary Anne. Power FM, maybe? Or 2XM? Or any one of a number of Internet radio stations, I'm guessing)? And that's what's so brilliant about 6 Music. Then she actually played "Windowlicker". Then she came back on, laughing about how transgressive and brilliant it was to play such a thing at ten to nine on a Saturday morning, and said, again, how amazing it was to have played it, and how brilliant it was to work for 6 Music. I swear, I am only very slightly paraphrasing.
"Shut up, you tedious bloody woman," I said, and turned off the radio.
Later in the day, I found myself turning off Gilles Peterson for much the same reason. I'm getting tired of people on the BBC telling me how great the BBC is. I know how great the BBC is, I don't need you to keep telling me. I'm listening, aren't I (well, except that I've turned you off)? Why don't you take out some advertising space on ITV to tell people over there how brilliant the BBC is? Isn't that how advertising works?
Then later, after my nap, when you would think I would be feeling less grumpy about people talking, I saw this article in the Independent about how David Attenborough has, to everyone's massive and lasting shock, endorsed Brian Cox as his successor. I'm not convinced.
Don't get me wrong, I love Coxy. I want to lie beside him on a hill and have him tell me about the heat death of the universe, over and over again, until I get dizzy and stop caring about the fact that I will never amount to anything because, you know, fucking entropy, man. But I don't want him to be the new presenter of natural history programmes. For one thing, doesn't he really just see animals as arrangements of particles, really? And for another, he's not Mister Telly.
You can see it in his presenting style. Either he's given too many lectures where eyes have glazed over and students have slumped onto the desk to truly believe that what he's saying is interesting to you, or the criticisms about the cost of his shows ("I'm here in Malaysia to show you how water behaves when it falls out of the sky") have got to his producers, and he has to keep telling you how brilliant it all is. Isn't it brilliant? Look at this thing, isn't it amazing?
It is amazing, is the thing. And we get that it's amazing. We don't need you to keep telling us. It's annoying.

3 comments:

egg.box said...

I was in the Arndale Centre in Manchester the other day. It was choc full of ads for... The Arndale Centre in Manchester.

Trish Byrne said...

Yeah, they do the same thing on E! At least twice during each episode of The Soup, they'll have an ad telling you when The Soup is on.

ian said...

There is nothing worse than people telling you how brilliant they are.