Connecting or Disconnecting with Culture?

Some time in the next three years our elderly television set will have to go, since it provides merely four analogue channels. Our dilemma is whether to live without TV, or embrace a multiplicity of digital possibilities. So I decided to read thoroughly a broadsheet media guide.

I immediately had a problem with the vocabulary. I started with an article about South Park – which I have never seen. The guide’s cover had a cartoon character from South Park, saying, ‘Respect my hilarity! Why South Park is still kickass’. The article began, ‘After 12 years, South Park’s potty-mouthed satire still, like, totally rules!’ I don’t fully understand, but actually I don’t want to. Is there a need to know? Is that what being an engaging Christian in today's world calls for?

Then I read about an MTV offering called Nitro Circus in which, "selected buddies plunge from a variety of different vehicles on to a variety of different surfaces. It is mildly diverting to ponder just how severely someone must injure themselves before it’s unfilmable. “This is so awesome!” guffaws one rider as yet another hunk of flesh scythes into the dirt. Somehow it’s difficult to look away."

Here’s another problem. If young men want to be filmed damaging themselves, so be it. But I thought we had dealt with the problem of circus exploitation of damaged humans and, more recently, animals, so it is hard to see the voyeurism of the freak show revived. In a two week period there was a documentary about Indonesian circus performers whose medical conditions made them ‘the star attraction’, programmes about the world’s heaviest man getting married, embarrassing illnesses, and the tallest children in the world. And, even on terrestrial TV, ‘reality’ programmes are, as far as I can see, built on the almost universal human weakness for watching others being put down, embarrassed, ejected. For every winner there are always many losers.

Should we silence the cacophony and withdraw to BBC radio? Or should we immerse ourselves in all of this in order to be connected with culture?

(Of course, there are great programmes - documentaries, travel and natural world, history and comment – but that is not my point.)

‘Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever in commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things’ (Philippians 4:8). How do I do that and sit in front of the circuses on the screen?

Over to you…

Margaret Killingray - www.licc.org.uk