British television companies have been in a bit of trouble recently and not just for producing excruciatingly bad programmes like 'Big Brother' and anything else to which the word 'reality' is attached. No, instead they've been caught engaging in plain honest-to-goodness deception.
The children's show, 'Blue Peter', asked viewers to name a new cat and then rejected their choice (which was 'Cookie') in favour of something more trendy and today. The production team, using their 'just-out-of-media-college we-know-best' brains decided to call it 'Socks'; so much more BBC HQ, so much less everywhere else. In addition several companies have been caught fixing competitions, taking millions of pounds off of viewers phoning in after the winners had been chosen but before the phone lines have been closed.
I'm not sure why all this is such a big thing. The media has always manipulated what it feeds its audience - canned laughter on situation comedies is a classic example, some of which couldn’t get a real laugh out of a guy high on nitrous oxide. It's the way it's done - these people are the modern day gods and our entertainment is in their hands. Picking a winner out of the studio audience and feeding her the correct answer after the phone-in has failed (another BBC gaff) is par for the course - all television must look perfect, failure is not to be tolerated, nothing must be seen to go wrong. If it does, your nice little media career could end up with you working as an advertising copywriter for the Balsall Heath Free News.
Anyway, I can hear you say, what has all this to do with the image above and why is he droning on anyway, hasn't he got a bed to got to? A legitimate query and one which I'm happy to answer. It’s about manipulating the image.
I thought the gravestone motif looked quite interesting with its channels of water glinting with reflected sky. Then I thought, wouldn't it look more interesting with a leaf? So I went and found one and placed it in an appropriate position and lo, it looked better and I took the picture. Then I thought, wouldn't it look even better if the leaf was more central? That thought was immediately followed by another one which was, wouldn't life itself be better if I went and had a piece of Orange & Almond Cake? So I did, leaving the even more perfect image as a figment of my imagination.
If there's a moral to this tale, and you’re going to be hard-pushed to find one, it is probably that while perfection is worth striving for, it’s not worth your soul, nor is it worth anything near as much as a good slice of cake.
3 comments:
Love that picture! The only thing I might have like even better would have been just a handful more leaves, not too many, just two or three, dropped from above, scattered as though they just innocently fell from a tree and landed there. But I thoroughly enjoy it just the way you have made it to be. I never would have guessed that was a gravestone though, it's beautiful.
(and about the slice of cake, I agree!)
didn't you say in there somewhere something about being god? Well, there you go - no wonder you felt an impulse to pose a leaf! And thank goodness (or the baker) for cake ;)
Thanks, Susan, and I agree, a little wind drift wuold have been really perfect - I'll try harder next time!
Me and cake, Pauline, inseparable. Perhaps I'm a Cake God?
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