In praise of… fun.
Let’s cut the crap and get right to it. Stargate (the TV series) is terrible. Burn Notice, while fun, has about as much depth as a small puddle in May, and Castle is about as poignant and profound as peanut butter. And in light of all this I say… hurrah!
I watch bad TV and I love it. I watch rubbish science fiction adventures where hearty, plucky heroes travel to far-flung worlds whose fashions, technology, architecture and moral habits seem oddly akin to those of seaboard Canada in the 21st Century, where every alien speaks English and the greatest problem you’re going to deal with can be cured with a bullet and half a bottle of petrol. I watch crime dramas where the height of emotional tension, and indeed narrative structuring, is when someone sits up and goes, ‘I dunno, cap’n, I’ve just got a feeling in my gut…’ I cheer whenever the Doctor finds the magic robot of narrative solutions in Dr Who, enjoy the sound of song performed with gusto if not necessarily content, and will simultaneously roll my eyes and smile happily at badly scripted put-downs in mildly brisk plot arcs.
I used to be ashamed of the bad things I watch – and make no mistake, a lot of TV is bad. It’s bad TV written by writers who are under pressure to step on no toes, kill no characters, push against any franchise walls. Growing up, ashamed to be seen watching such things, I wasn’t just in the geek closet, I had set up steel reinforced doors around my wardrobe, set trip wires along the floor and tucked three pounds of explosive underneath a warning sign that read, ‘oh no, guv, it wasn’t me you saw watching ITV at 7 p.m. on a wet Sunday in August, oh no…’
I like fun. I don’t like unforgivably bad TV, I hasten to add – there are certain things which are so bad, so utterly, astonishingly rubbish that I will not, cannot watch, and these are usually the programs that take themselves seriously and believe that having pretty people looking moody is a substitute for narrative content. Those programs where the writers, having run out of steam, break their own rules, deny their own characters, hammer in coincidence to fix a problem and believe that having a pregnant mother kill a puppy whose owner was having an unhappy love affair, is in any way, shape or form, the same thing as meaningful emotional content. I cannot bare Eastenders, would run a mile from watching most British police procedurals, and loathe most reality TV as being no more than the exploitation and derision of the people they pursue.
But I love fun. I love good dramas too, and lament frequently that film and TV don’t push at the boundaries of what might, what could, what should more often. I love intelligent writing, interesting ideas, complicated characters, emotional depth – I love being shocked, frightened, disturbed, confused, I really do, but sometimes, when these things aren’t readily available on BBC1 and it’s raining outside, I just love watching something fun.
The same thing with books. Catch 22 is an absolutely fantastic novel; Shakespeare’s a total dude. But the Complete Garfield makes me laugh until I have an asthma attack, an the collected works of Arthur Conan Doyle are just the perfect light reading for a long train ride at a late hour of the night. I love what I guess I’d have to term bad books and bad TV, but only when it’s executed with craft, and gusto, and a sense of delight at what’s happening on the page or on the screen, since frankly, I’m willing to forgive the complete lack of content in light of what a good damn time the writers are having, and what joy they are about to share with you, their geeky, forgiving audience.
I will not, under any circumstances, attribute anything more to such works than the temporary blip of happiness their passing induces, but I will stand up now and say loud and clear that fun is important. Fun is vital! A few minutes of fun, a few seconds of shame-faced glee, goes an awfully long way to making a better day.
