The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

I’ve just discovered a thread over at Sarsparilla on one of my favourite television shows: The Cook and the Chef. I came to the discussion a bit late, unfortunately, but I found it interesting because I’ve just finished writing an article that explores many of the problematics that the blog posting raises. The post focuses on the relationship between Simon and Maggie in terms of the amateur/professional dichotomy set up by the show itself…

First a disclaimer: I absolutely adore BBC motoring show Top Gear. I’m not a petrol head, but the repartee between the three presenters is classic, and Jeremy Clarkson’s staunchly non-PC delivery is one of life’s guilty pleasures. Even the actual reviews—always of cars that cost more than I will earn in my lifetime (“Now we get quite a few complaints that we don’t feature enough affordable cars on the show, so we’re kicking off tonight with the cheapest Ferrari of them all”)—are beautifully, cinematically filmed: car-porn, even for the terminally disinterested.

Verity Lambert, one of the BBC’s earliest and youngest female television producers — and the pioneering first producer of Doctor Who — has died at the age of 71. Her influential career spanned such hits as Minder and Jonathan Creek.

I’ve been watching the reality-TV show on SBS called Eco House Challenge because it looked interesting from the previews, and I thought I might learn something about sustainability. Given that it airs on SBS and is made by Prospero Productions —a company responsible for a number of respected documentaries—I was quite optimistic about it. Oh dear, how wrong can you get!

It’s nothing more…

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve abandoned 24 due to its wearying and constant delight in the aesthetics of torture. So the material in this article from The New Yorker comes as no huge shock.

For all its fictional liberties, “24” depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America’s survival that demands the toughest of tactics. Not long after September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the “dark side” in countering terrorism. On “24,” the dark side is on full view. Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a “right-wing nut job,” shares his show’s hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, “Isn’t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow—or any other city in this country—that, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?”

And, in an age of endless moral panics about the psychologically destructive effects of violent video games, it’s disturbing that there is so little concern paid when a conservative media text’s depiction of torture are documented to have inspired actual cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq.

I’m not sure whether to be ecstatic or very, very worried: remakes of cult TV shows can be appalling, but a 2006 version of Monkey is being made by a Japanese production company.

OK, I know that Nick is supposed to the Doctor Who expert, but I couldn’t help noticing how different the writing and design were in the final seasons, compared to those when the show was at its peak…

I gave up on 24 a couple of years ago after I realised that the show was becoming increasingly dedicated to the aestheticisation of torture. Things haven’t changed much. Here’s Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian, writing on the same issue:

Therein also resides the lie of 24: that it is not only possible to retain human dignity in performing acts of terror, but that if an honest person performs such an act as a grave duty, it confers on him a tragic-ethical grandeur. The parallel between the agents’ and the terrorists’ behaviour serves this lie.

On the other hand, the show also seems to now be mixing its pro-torture aesthetic with a strong anti-Bush critique:

What we have this season is President Charles Logan, possibly the most worthless excuse for a fictional leader of the free world ever. Just how much of dink will they make him into? Will he eventually panic and order the assassination of Jack Bauer? Start rolling around on the floor and chewing the carpet? Or will the scriptwriters chicken out and allow him to redeem himself with some unexpected act of moral bravery at the end?

Yes, I’ve missed a decade. And by “missed”, I mean “totally ignored”.

One of the most striking things I’ve noticed about the triumphant return of Doctor Who to television has been how smoothly it has slipped back into the—sometimes rather twee—traditions of British popular culture.