The thing about TV...

I was talking to a documentary maker at work the other day and we were discussing various documentaries. I was complaining about one I saw at a festival last year. They had used libary cues for the music but hadn't matched them for length. That's not cheap: it's lazy. They also had an academic talking head who was discussing something and its source and then said maybe it was from another book. Stop the camera. Go look. It's not live. So we were laughing about shoddiness and she was saying to me that if we watched TV together we would get properly annoyed.

So here are some of the things that annoy me about TV and film. If they don't already I hope they will from now on.

1 Eating
I was watching 'the hunt for red october' last night - unchallenging light entertainment - and Seán Connery was eating while others were talking around him. Perhaps it was to express that through his big beard, perhaps it's because he's a rotten actor, but he did that eating thing people do on TV: jaws working furiously and violently. It doesn't look like eating. A bit like when they sign in a film they
SHOUT! HANDS SMASHED INTO EACH OTHER.
Maybe they should go visit some deaf people or something. I once shared a flat with a stage actor. He was doing a play with PanPan theatre company. Something barking about Strindberg's diaries. He signed all day every day and at night he read Strindberg and books about seeing sound and being deaf. He was mad by the end of it. When I went to the play with a deaf guy he couldn't believe he wasn't a native signer. For all their talk I don't see that in big budget movies. I see people doing trashy, showy, yet lazy performances. Oscars night they love that shit.

2 Rain
It never rains, but it pours. Seriously, what is it with rain in the movies? The bigger the budget the more ludicrous the rain is. Big sheets of rain, each 'drop' the size of a biro. I've seen lower budget films and the rain making machines in operation (I used to live overlooking this laneway that got used for making films about every month - directors have the most irritating, arrogant, smug, loud voices at six on a Sunday morning 'camera, speed, action, extras ....') and it doesn't end up looking quite as silly as big budget films where they have banks of the yokes and enough water to keep a small town going.

3 Fake introductions
I don't know why on TV programmes they persist in having the presenters call on the people they are visiting and greeting as if it's the first time they met. With the cameras inside and everything. Why this pointless little lie? It's unconvincing and serves no purpose. It undermines the audiences faith in the rest of the show, as to how staged it is (very, it's on TV obviously). This is mearely a minor manifestation of the collossal scam that is 'reality TV'. Anyway, I watch this stuff to get away from reality.