Without wishing to sound like one of the frothier wingnuts over on the Daily Telegraph's blog site, Lost in Showbiz has long considered ITV2 to be proof-positive that the licence fee could be abolished and the BBC closed immediately without any injury whatsoever to the cerebral fibre of the nation. Here, it feels, is firm evidence of what commercial television can do when it allows great minds to devote themselves to the business of providing a diet of intellectual sustenance, varied and nutritious in equal measure.
Look at a small sample of what's been on offer in the past few years: a diverse menu degustation of Michelin-starred brain food. When Jordan Met Peter; Jordan and Peter Laid Bare; Jordan and Peter: Marriage and Mayhem; Katie and Peter: The Next Chapter; Katie and Peter: The Baby Diaries; Katie and Peter Unleashed; Katie and Peter Down Under; Katie and Peter: African Adventures; Katie and Peter Stateside; What Katie Did Next; Peter Andre: Going It Alone; Peter Andre: My Life; Peter Andre: Here 2 Help; and Peter Andre's Bad Boyfriend Club. And seven (yes) series of Keith Lemon's Celebrity Juice. And Top Dog Model, in which Stacey Solomon attempts to find a dog to star in a commercial for Cif bathroom cleaner. What need have we of the BBC when the Reithian model of broadcasting is being followed to the letter elsewhere?
LiS is aware that this is not a view shared by all. Here they come, the sanctimonious metropolitan liberal elite, thundering from their bully-pulpit, making wild, unfounded claims that stuffing your schedule like a foie gras goose with endless repeats of The Jeremy Kyle Show is somehow different from their beloved BBC4's endless reruns of Timeshift and Omnibus and Life on Earth. There are those who would have you believe that ITV2 isn't so much a digital channel as a kind of televisual manure spray, pumping an unceasing gush of cloacal sludge over viewers who appear to be too dim to move out of the way. There are those who'll tell you that it seems to exist primarily to support the pointless pool of non-celebrity that acts as terrible human ballast in the gossip magazines. There are those who fervently wish someone involved in the production of Celebrity Juice would have a sudden attack of conscience and follow a similar path of brutal public honesty to that taken by Angus T Jones, the young star of American sitcom Two and a Half Men, who last week gave an interview in which he described the sitcom as the work of Satan and urged: "Please stop watching it, please stop watching it, please stop filling your head with filth, please, people say it's just entertainment but do some research on the effects of television on your brain … it's bad news … watch out, WATCH OUT."
But this week, LiS felt confident there would at last be an end to the sniping. ITV2 surpassed itself, by broadcasting perhaps the most intellectually demanding and indeed rewarding 50 minutes of television in living memory. LiS watched The Only Way Is Essex: Live awestruck at its audacity, its stern refusal to underestimate its audience. Its mind bulged at the dexterous way its makers interwove a tapestry of references to European experimental cinema and theatre. It noted the profound influence of Dizga Vertov's 1929 masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera, both in its conception – like Vertov, the makers were clearly intent on creating a brutally non-linear "experimentation in the cinematic communication of visual phenomena" without story, scenario or actors – and its bold use of the jump cut: at one point, the action shifted, literally mid-sentence, from a couple endlessly discussing their love lives, to an elderly woman saying "have to go toilet". It noted the dialogue, pitched somewhere between Beckett and Pinter, heavy with agonising pauses, thick with repetition – "I dunno, I dunno." "What do you mean you dunno?" "Nothing. I dunno." "What do you mean you dunno?" "I dunno." – as if trying to draw the audience into a void beyond linguistic expression and communicate a loss of faith in the very efficacy of language itself. And it noted the liberal application of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt: the numerous junctures where the cast stared blankly into space or looked mutely towards the director with panicked, desperate eyes until he audibly told them what to talk about, the moment where the elderly lady of "have to go toilet" fame appeared to mouth "what's happening?", all designed to jolt the audience out of their bourgeois complacency. Here, felt LiS, was a true triumph of the avant garde, a perfect example of ITV2's staunch refusal to talk down to its viewers.
And then came the reviews: "the end of civilisation","a new low, even for ITV2", "I wouldn't wish this programme on my worst enemy", "a turd", "one of the most disastrous programmes in television history". Was it only LiS that found itself reminded of the frosty reception given other pivotal works of art simply too advanced for the middlebrow critics to understand them: of Le Figaro calling Le Sacre du Printemps "a laborious and puerile banality", of the "cruel sarcasms and vulgar mockeries" heaped on the 1874 impressionist exhibition?
Perhaps so. The baffling consensus appeared to be that the makers of TOWIE: Live were in some way the worst kind of cynics, driven by a deep and profound loathing of television as a medium, everyone who appears on it and everyone who watches it. Furthermore, they reserved a particularly vicious contempt for their own devoted audience – people they seem to regard as a barely sentient mass of imbecility prepared to literally put up with anything – that they could have expressed no more obviously if they'd gone round to each and every viewer's home, knocked on the door, kicked them repeatedly in the genitals then barged their way into the living room and engaged in the activity the Dutch refer to as wildpoepen on their coffee table.
To the critics, LiS has some stern words of its own: don't mock what you fail to understand. Why tear down those who chose to aim a little higher than your own intellect can grasp? Why not take a leaf out of ITV2's book: never underestimate the public.
