However getting your hands on a Freeview box is the best way to see incredibly stupid television. The bizarre UKTV History is one channel who's sole purpose seems to be repeating BBC history documentaries. Another great one is UKTV Style, which doesn't actually seem to do anything. The worst offender is Sky Three, a pointless exercise which is 90% travel shows and the rest crap American cop shows.
Some of the funniest channels are things like Bid-Up TV, or Price-Drop TV or whatever they're called. It's particually great to see them openly mocking their viewers for being thick imbeciles by selling them some piece of tat and then dropping the price for another thick imbecile to buy one. This process continues until they've run out of nose-clippers or solar powered candles or elephant detection kits or whatever shit their selling. And if the price can drop by 50% in a couple of minutes, it doesn't look to be a good long term investment. It's somehow more sleazy than the traditional TV shopping channels, and the presenters are practically laughing in the face of everyone watching. An altogther disturbing experience.
But the best things for crap TV are the millions of so called "interactive" quiz shows that appear around 11PM, aka the time pissed people get home from the pub. These are genuinely worrying. The main draw is big cash prizes for doing something simple like adding numbers together. What is worrying is the amount of people who can't do this simple task at all. Another quiz I saw was name a job beggining with S. Easy, you say (although on this occasion some cretin did submit the answer "dentist"). The more obscure your answer the more likely it will match one of the ones they want. So you go with "submariner" or something like that. Nope, they've selected a question with a massive amount of possible answers, so to win the £20,000 or whatever you'd need to guess something like "sulphuric acid taster" or "squirrel molestor".
Things are made worse by the set up of the entire situation, which is very disorientating. The camera move about constantly, across brightly coloured sets, which a seemingly psychotic presenter on their own, just talking non-stop for THREE FUCKING HOURS. It's fucking worrying, they just offer up a stream of conscience thought with no real relevence to anything. Occasionally they'll talk to the crew or something, or a caller, in amongst a multitude of random and insane little sound clips, played by a soundman with tourettes, presumably. And always the the presenters will be perky and happy completely ignoring the fact that they are on a ridiculously low budget TV show who's sole purpose is to steal people's money.
And that is the worst thing about them. To "take part" you have to ring a premium rate phone number which charges you anything up to a quid, for the chance to possibly take part in the quiz and have a guess. You pay your cash on your phone bill no matter what, and even if you do get through to the presenter on air (a stupidly unlikely event) you'll probably be wrong anyway. It's reckoned ITV rakes in millions every month from their shows Quizmania and The Mint, just so they can continue to produce high quality programming such as Screwdrivers From Hell, or Celebrity Date Rape Island. In fact the dumbing down of ITV has got to the point where it's unwatchable to anyone with at least one GCSE or similar (even the ITV news has morphed into some kind of Daily-Mail-with-moving-pictures). This leaves it's only audience being thick working class people, with barely any money anyway. Give them a chance to win a few thousand and they'll be right up there.
Of course this is bollocks, and just another tax on the poor, similar to the National Lottery and scratchcards. This is because those who are rich are generally better educated and can see this as a crock of shit, but at the lower end of the wealth spectrum you're left with poor bastards who can barely afford to pay their bills trying to take any opportunity to get themselves out of debt and financial trouble. It's the same reason all those "debt restructuring" adverts appear on daytime TV, if you're watching them you're probably unemployed and more likely to be financially fucked. The argument could be made that they make the decision to call in and waste their money on what will almost certainly be a fruitless exercise, but that's just an example of rationalising greedy behaviour behind a mask of fiscal libertarianism. What's more its another part of the worrying trend of allowing people more and more access to opportunities to piss their money away gambling from their own home.
While this may reflect a new era of "choice" for the individual, it isn't particually helpful to allow people to get themselves fucked for life without some kind of safeguard against it.
Having said all this of course, I am hopelessly infatuated with Debbie King, a presenter with all the charm of a little lost puppy and a deeply irritating habit of being too happy for someone still working at 1 in the morning, but who, in a drunken stupor (my usual state in watching Quizmania), could feasibly pass for the most beautiful person on the planet.
Everybody's Happy Nowadays