Music Television and its Discontents

When I got a freeview box I was very excited about the music channels and used to have them on all the time – basically you get two channels: TMF which is owned by MTV/VH1 etc and "The Hits"; god knows what that one is all about. It was like listening to the radio! But with pictures! Unfortunately that was before I realised that (a) their transmission time is about 50% adverts for the Crazy Frog (from his unequal pupils I surmise that the so called “Crazy” Frog has actually had a stroke or some other brain trauma rather than being “crazy” – thank god those years of watching ER were good for something); and (b) that they only ever play about five videos, three of which are by Usher.

As though they do not make enough money from their HALF HOUR LONG advertising slots, the freeview music channels also try and gouge their viewers by making them pay to request videos and also by running lame “love match” type things along the bottom of the screen, i.e. you pay £1.50 to txt two names in and it spews out some random bollocks like “This love has no future. Melinda is a honey but look at James’ pants.” When I was recently on holiday in the Baltics, we would put on German freeview music channels in the hotel and I saw the next disturbing stage to this texting madness – people actually have an inbox and profile and send in pictures of themselves. It is like “faceparty.com” meets “The Chart Show”. From my extensive research, the kinds of people who send their pictures in are goth girls called “drklver”, teenage boys who wish the world “peace” or “love” in txtspeak, fans of Tokio Hotel (shit german band who have apparently been cloned from Duran Duran’s toenail clippings) or pasty faced forty year olds looking for wives. I have seen the future of “The Hits” and it is some spotty 14 year old from Dortmund informing us that “schone madchen sind groovy LOL”.

“The Hits” channel is the worst for this; at least TMF sometimes shows “documentaries” – these mainly seem to consist of old episodes of “Cribs” or “Jessica and Nick: Newlyweds”, or else are about Paris Hilton’s 100 most vacuous moments or the way that Lindsay Lohan once called Hilary Duff a bitch. These list type shows are just like the ones in the UK (ie they have some minor celebrity making non witty comments about the entries) so if you ever wanted to know who is the US equivalent of Paul Ross or Kate Thornton then you should watch these programmes for sure. My boyfriend’s housemates recently won free Sky Plus for a year and so have about three million proper music channels which actually show different genres of music. I am very jealous. We watched the rock chart on MTV and they showed things like Arcade Fire!!! Amazing! Arcade Fire would only ever appear on TMF if Paris Hilton tripped over one of them and her boobs fell out of her dress.