Quatermass and The Shit

I take the fact that the television's new year has kicked off with a surfeit of celebrity-orientated 'reality' TV as further proof that the End Times are upon us. How else can one explain the continued presence upon our screens of the likes of Jade Goody and Russell Brand? Indeed, that's why I find 'Celebrity' Big Brother particularly offensive, not only does it drag a parade of desperate has-beens, exhibitionists and total wankers, all trying vainly to breath life into the dying embers of their media 'careers', across my TV tube, it also gives Channel Four another excuse to wheel out that shambling twat Brand, in his role as some kind of 'commentator'. Why does Channel Four persist with him? Every show he has fronted has been cancelled. Clearly, audiences can't stand him. The only explanation for his continued existence is that either has compromising photographs of the entire Channel Four board rutting with underage baboons, or he is some agent of evil. Right now, I'm tending toward the latter explanation.

Obviously, having discovered that there are enough drooling morons out there to form a viable audience for dross like 'Big Brother', TV execs are hell-bent on trying to drag the rest of us down to this same level by constantly bombarding us with this mindless shit in the expectation it will cause our brains to melt. The role of the Russell Brands in all this is to convince those of us still in possession of our faculties that the path to success lies in behaving like an arsehole. The only slim hope I have is that the late Nigel Kneale proves to be right. Prior to predicting the advent of 'reality' TV in his prescient 1960s TV play Year of The Sex Olympics, Kneale's Quatermass and The Pit had suggested that human intelligence was the result of genetic and social engineering by the long extinct Martians, several million years ago. When released back to the Earth, the 'modified' apemen would - in response to a signal from the Martian spaceship - use their telekinetic powers to cull any non-modified apemen in the vicinity, so as to ensure the predominance of their own genes. I am now fervently hoping that, as in the Quatermass serial, a crashed Martian ship is uncovered on a construction site, and that it emits the culling signal, enabling us to unleash our hidden powers and vanquish the morons. Of course, there's always the chance that it'll turn out to be them who have the hidden powers, and that they'll use them to reduce the rest of us to their level by addling our brains...