Dialogue: Our TV is an aesthetic and mental wasteland

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

A number of critics in Western countries have been discussing in recent years how and why popular culture and so-called high culture have begun to merge. While one set heightens its interest and elevates its taste, particularly in design, movies and literature, the other eschews the snobbery that once insisted classical music was automatically superior to pop, folk and jazz, and that dead poets and painters were inevitably better than live ones.

A broader range of people are finding pleasure and aesthetic stimulus from such enduring art forms as the design of clothing and everyday artefacts, as well as the theatre, the novel and music. They may not be pushing the boundaries of taste but they are gaining satisfaction and fulfillment from what was once regarded as upper middlebrow culture.

The Edge CEO Greg Innes told me the other day that many Pacific Island secondary school students are delighted and entranced by opera. I sat next to a schoolboy from Papatoetoe at a performance of Julius Caesar a year ago and, when we chatted during the interval, I realised that he and his whole class were much more intelligently interested in Shakespeare than my generation of schoolboys was.

Critics valuably argue about whether this is beneficial to the generality of people as well as to literature and other arts forms, or whether it demeans taste, however slightly.

But the television industry, in New Zealand anyway, wants, defensively, to avoid the argument altogether and to insist in the most patronising way that people should get what programmers and advertisers think they deserve, that questionable viewer ratings alone should be allowed to judge the merits of the medium, and that it is elitist to talk about quality of programming. These great truths, they apparently insist, should remove their work from public criticism.

So, when the Prime Minister says once what so many of us are saying all the time - that television in New Zealand produces few programmes that command our attention - she is attacked. She was, according to John Harris, managing director of Greenstone Pictures, in effect dumping on hundreds of thousands of ordinary Kiwis who enjoy the populist shows on TV and on the hundreds of professional producers, writers, directors and production teams who are working hard to make New Zealand programmes.

Just as patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, working hard is the last defence of the mindless. We all work hard, including, I'm sure, some prostitutes and fraudsters, and graffiti-writers seem indefatigable and resourceful to me.

Harris says Helen Clark should respect the tastes of her electorate. In other words, don't disrespect the ratings. Presumably he believes that the advertisements in top-rating programmes are our favourites commercials. Then he goes on to slag elitist pretension with: "Not everyone owns a piano and original art and goes to the opera. To pour scorn [which Helen Clark didn't] on artistic output [which it mostly isn't] that does not appeal to her personal taste will only help to alienate her from the general public."

If Harris seriously believes that slagging bad television will offend the electorate, then he really is working too hard and probably spending too much time alone in darkened editing rooms.

By and large, television in this country is a mental and aesthetic wasteland with quality always demeaned by commercial pressure. I don't own a piano but I am constantly trying to raise my literary and artistic taste whether the (non-existent) ordinary Kiwi likes it or not.

So I am stoutly on the side of the Prime Minister. So far.

What I want her to do now is to put Labour's money where its mouth has been and deliver on the pre-election promise to provide us with some form of public service television. The promulgated charter is worth less than the paper it's printed on.

If the Government doesn't believe public television is viable, how come National Radio has such a large, appreciative audience?

What do you think would happen if a government decided to give to police, criminals and any citizen unrestricted access to armaments? Right, the level of social discourse would descend to that of the lowest group of psychopaths.

So the never-ending terrorism and counter-terrorism in the Middle East should surprise no one.

If you want to know where those rockets, shells and bullets whistling around Israel and Palestine came from, note these figures: the Big Three exporters in the international arms trade last year were the United States with nearly half the total at $US53.4 billion, then Britain with $US10.5 billion and France with $US6.5 billion.

The biggest market for weapons systems is the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest buyer with more than $US6 billion in purchases last year. Bear in mind also that Israel has a major armaments industry.

These figures come from a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, quoted in the Guardian.

The report also notes that these three Western permanent members of the United Nations Security Council account for 80 per cent of the world's weapon sales at a time when it is incapable of mounting effective peacekeeping operations.

Make sense of that.