He dobbed me in, my own f. and b. ‘Da-ad, she’s been shouting at the telly again,’ he said as soon as my husband walked in from a hard day’s being flattered at work. I was surrounded by disapproving family males, all two of them.
‘I thought we’d agreed you were going to give that up,’ said the old one, more in sorrow than in anger.
‘Only for Lent, dammit, and by the way, you snitching young yobbo, “she” is the cat’s mother.’
‘Quick, give her some chocolate, she’s resorting to cliché,’ said the young one. I snatched it and went snarling into a corner to reflect.
What is it about some aspects of our viewing culture that gets me so pen-snappingly cross? Perhaps I should start at the beginning, with a small Spot Quiz, folks. OK: are the following statements true or false?
America
(a) invented singing, indeed all music, in the early 1900s in New York, Chicago or the deep South;
(b) won both World Wars single-handed;
(c) has three in every hundred people in jail;
(d) has more guns than people.
Hollywood and the White House tell us (b) and Michael Moore (recently and amazingly on Oprah) tells us (c) and (d) but it’s left to The Voice to tell us (a). The ABC ran this documentary on Sundays in August at 7.30, in a timeslot competing with Ten’s Australian Idol. What a choice. Poisonous and cruel destruction of fragile youthful self-esteem on the one hand and fake history on the other. Perhaps that’s rather harsh, but I kept waiting for the programs to explore that extraordinary instrument, the human voice, and was disappointed. Alan Lewens, a London-based authority on popular music, was the series’ creator.
Two years ago he created the series Walk On By, which tracked the development of popular music in a somewhat idiosyncratic but always interesting way. It became compulsory viewing in our music-mad house. But The Voice seems to have been cobbled from fag-ends of the previous series. There are a couple of throws to opera singers, but the faults of Walk On By were well in evidence without its saving virtues: maddening voice-overs, endless talking heads and not enough performance footage. Lewens seems to have a genius for ripping the climax out of an archival performance of someone like Ella Fitzgerald doing ‘Summertime’ to cross to some obscure American saying something along the lines of ‘Ella was really really good. No,