Way back in 1975 when I first started working, I was employed by a textiles wholesaler working in their haberdashery department. I was the only lad at sixteen working in a department with six ladies all old enough to be my mother, or maybe even my grandmother. They were quite an entertaining little gang and often amused me, chiefly because they were quite snobby in their own way. One subject that would crop up frequently was Coronation Street, not one of my six colleagues would ever admit to watching the programme, I can still remember one of them claiming “we only ever watch the BBC in our house” she would say as though ITV, the only other option at the time, was for the common people and way beneath her high standards. Remarkably, my six colleagues nearly always seemed to know what was happening in the soap opera, the excuse being “we don’t watch it, but it was on” as though nobody could admit to actually enjoying the programme.
Over the years, I have become quite a TV snob myself, the first episode of Channel four’s Big Brother was aired in July 2000 and started an eighteen year run of the show and I believed was the point that the rot started with television programmes in this country. Over the years we have become obsessed with watching other people do very basic things, it seems to me that people who do quite ordinary jobs, that aren’t that interesting are suddenly catapulted into the limelight as we watch avidly as they live their lives trying to be something special. I mock the fact that we are entertained today, by actually watching ordinary people, watching Television and that is nothing compared with the huge social media business that has emerged, where people make a substantial living filming their day to day lives and uploading them so that ordinary people can watch ordinary people, doing ordinary things.
I wonder what my six ladies, possibly all who are now promoted to higher things, would think about it, there is a new snobbery today, which extends to far more than TV soaps. Today, people say “I have nothing to do with social media” as though they are evil.
It would be wrong of me to claim that social media is not without its problems, but it strikes me that we either bury our heads in the sand, ignore it in the way my ladies used to ignore, (or at least claim to ignore the existence of Coronation Street), or we show an interest.