Lacking Variety

I suppose that it is another sign that Christmas is imminent that they've just shown the Royal Variety Performance on ITV.  I have to say that I'm more shocked by the fact that the Royal Variety Performance is still a thing than I am that Christmas is so close.  I mean, it seems such an anachronism - not just the idea of putting on a performance for the benefit of Royalty, but the idea of 'Variety' as entertainment.  I know that they keep trying to revive it in the form of things like Britain's Got Talent, but the very concept of 'Variety' entertainment has surely had its day, hasn't it?  When I was growing up in the seventies, the 'Variety Show' was still a staple of the TV schedules, particularly Saturday nights.  For kids of my generation, they seemed dire, full of anachronistic acts that had somehow survived the demise of the music hall and were now dying a lingering death on our TV screens.  They really did seem to come from another era and were squarely aimed at viewers old enough to remember the music halls and variety theatres.  Ironically, of course, it was TV variety shows in the fifties and sixties which had killed those venues and was now sustaining these displaced acts in this tedious after life,

Back in the day, your average juggler, acrobat, mediocre singer and one-joke comic could spend their entire careers working the theatres with barely a change to their act - they played to relatively small audiences and there was always a new audience and a new venue.  With TV, you did your act once on a show and the whole nation had seen it - who was going to pay to see it again in a music hall when it was available for free in their own living room?  Yet TV persisted with those bloody shows, despite the fact that, as I quickly realised as a kid, once you've seen one juggler, you've seen them all.  Believe me, even for a seven or eight year old, the novelty of people spinning plates, riding unicycles, eating fire or bashing themselves over the head with a tin tray soon wore off.  I'd sooner have been watching Dr Who, Sexton Blake or The Persuaders.  At least things happened in them and the stories they told were sufficiently different from week-to-week (although still formulaic) that didn't seem repetitive.  (When I was young, the second most boring type of programme on TV after variety shows were, I felt, soap operas, which seemed to be just people talking in what looked like your own living room - I got that at home, 24/7).  Yet TV executives seem to think that there is still some sort of public demand for one-trick novelty acts, dull singers, cack-handed musicians and middle-of-the-road comedians.  Not in my house, though.