sweet effay

I fell asleep in front of a video the other night and, when I woke up, was confronted with the most appalling piece of television I have ever encountered. I had heard about Quizmania, ITV’s phone-in quiz show which runs throughout most of the night, but nothing could really prepare me for the reality: It is like (and now here’s something I never thought I would say) Family Fortunes with all the good bits taken out.

Back in the Eighties, when people were getting excited about channel hopping and fast edits on MTV, Alvin Toffler coined the term ‘blip culture’ to describe, amongst other things, a relationship of viewer to televisual spectacle where everything is presented in tiny pieces of information, constantly shifting from one subject to the other. Quizmania is the absolute antithesis of blip culture. Even more than Big Brother, it is based upon ennui. This is because, unlike Big Brother which commands the viewer’s attention by holding out the possibility that something might happen (those bored people could start arguing; perhaps one of those sleeping bodies will wake up and masturbate), Quizmania is deliberately constructed so that it appears that even less is happening than is actually taking place: The presenter lets the whole thing grind to a halt as if he is waiting for somebody to phone in, when the phones are actually constantly backed up. In this way, the crushing boredom, coupled with the presenter’s ‘hints’ as to the answers to the questions, entices the viewer to ring in because it appears as though s/he will get straight through and any form of action will break the ennui in which s/he is forced to feel complicit.

However the whole thing is, of course, one big con aimed at getting the 60p call charge out of as many people as possible. This becomes apparent when one realises that Quizmania is the only programme on ITV with no adverts, and that many of the people who do get through to the programme have no idea what has been happening for considerable periods of time beforehand (they keep repeating wrong answers). I must confess that I suspected this was how it was operating but my faith in human nature is such that I could not bring myself to believe that it was quite this cynical without further proof. Consequently, I rang in during a particularly extended lull in order to see what would happen. Naturally I got a recorded message telling me that all the phones lines were backed up and that I had paid 60p for the privilege of discovering this.

Is it popular? I don’t really know. A more interesting question is can it maintain whatever popularity it has? I think the answer has to be yes, because players (they don’t really care about viewers) will assume that, as time goes on, it will become easier to get through as the more casual amongst their number give up. My guess is that if the number of phone calls goes down radically (although I doubt that it will), they will reduce the number of lines, thereby cutting costs and still keeping the players hooked on the same length of line. There are more unpleasant programmes on UK television, but this has to be the most cynical piece manipulation of viewers yet; I await the next nadir with bated breath.