Why TVO drives me crazy

Yesterday at the CAPP rally I saw Steve Paiken, a TVO personality/host. He was there with a woman who I think may have been Belinda Stronach. I’m not sure. She was blonde, very well dressed, obviously wealthy and privileged, and very out of place. Anyway, it got me thinking about TVO: TV Ontario, a public broadcaster that I used to watch quite frequently. Hey, I didn’t have cable, and out of the 9 channels my antenna picked up TVO had the best reception. They also showed “Rosemary and Thyme” and other weird British crime dramas of which I am a fan.

How can I describe the general tenor of TVO’s programming to someone who’s never seen it? TVO exists for middle-aged privileged hippies. It shows you things that make you feel like you are engaging in culture, like you’re making a difference, like you’re a broad-minded liberal person. They show random British programmes, political roundtables, nature shows, documentaries, classic films, public lectures (I’m listening to a TVO lecture podcast right now) and the kind of kid’s programming that kids hate watching. And in spite of the liberal orientation it is in its own way deeply reactionary.

Why do I say this? What’s my beef with TVO, considering that I used to watch it before I got rid of my TV and I still consume some of their content in podcast form?

TVO is reactionary because it is a walled garden, a zoo for culture. It is a media ghetto for people who live in $750,000 houses and take eco-tourist holidays to Bali but think of themselves as rebels. That is their viewer, and that viewer’s subjectivity is firmly embedded in just about everything they do. Sure, they air documentaries about the plight of Walmart workers or Shenzen factory employees or struggling farmers in Africa. Sure, they cover these things in a sympathetic and social-justice oriented way. But always as others, always as “Look at these poor deprived people! Don’t their lives suck compared to your comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle?”* Which is funny, because poor people seem like the most likely of all income groups to watch TVO, because you can still get it if you don’t have cable and it doesn’t run commercials. (That’s why I watched it, and at that time I was pretty poor.) Yet these people are clearly not the audience they have in mind. Now I don’t know what a public broadcaster who considered their primary audience to be people who make $7/hour would look like, but it sure as hell wouldn’t look like TVO.

Why am I ranting about this here instead of Scintillator?

Because even if I haven’t written here much I’ve still been thinking about stuff. Right now all my individual projects are in their infancy, in the getting-off-the-ground stage. But when they get off the ground, where are they going to go?

What I do isn’t commercially viable, isn’t something the mainstream media and cultural channels are interested in. But there is a parallel media, a parallel set of institutions that are supposed to be there for stuff that doesn’t fit into the mainstream.

And they’re all kind of like TVO. Don’t know why, but they are.

So let’s hope some kind of massive EMP takes out the satellites but leaves the Internet untouched; then we can start over and do it right.

*And even though my house is worth much, much less than $750,000 and I’ve never been to Bali, my life is still way better than any of the oppressed people I listed. It’s also much better than it was when I watched TVO.

~ by kristinmh on January 24, 2010.