Given their length, and the gnashing inconvenience of typing letter by letter like someone entering their initials in a Donkey Kong high-score table, there is little you can communicate in a text message beyond ‘I LIKE YOUR BUM’ or ‘ME GO WEE PLOPS’. Which is why only flirts and dunces use them. Oh, and teenagers, who fall into both categories by default.
Nevertheless, for some unhinged reason, BBC1 considers text messaging remarkable enough to devote this evening to The Joy of Text (BBC1), a broadcast that promises to be jam-packed with all the thrills and spills you’ve come to associates with the ASCII-based SMS mobile communications system.
They might as well broadcast nothing but a caption reading ‘WE HAVE GIVEN UP’. Or simply tour the nation door to door, asking viewers to watch ITV instead. In fact, they’re doing something only marginally less humiliating: bunging on a documentary that’s simply one of the most desperate, worthless non-programmes ever to cross the airwaves.
How desperate? Well, for starters, it relies heavily on talking-head contributions from Vanessa Feltz, Steps, John McCririck, Ian Wright and Hannah Waterman.
Q: Hannah Waterman?
A: Yes, you know – Ian’s wife in EastEnders. Dennis Waterman’s daughter.
Q: Ah. So what’s she got to do with text meassaging?
A: Ummmm…
Despite clearly having been selected solely on the basis of their availability rather than any particular interest in text-based mobile communications, the nano-celebs, in question gamely chirrup away about this astonishingly TV-friendly phenomenon.
Only flirts and dunces [fragment]
uit: Screen burn - Charlie Brooker
____
