I worked in the TV / media industry for a fair few years so learned how scummy and rotten it is from the inside

it has a nasty vindictive streak because everyone is trying to fuck each other over to get work so and it has got so much worse in the last 10 years so its hardly surprising most of the top shows are full of negative content

I don’t watch telly these days , it also annoys me that we spend public money making shite like Eastenders and then we export it to other nations and that is the image foreigners get of Britain..

I’m a Londoner and to me Eastenders does for the image of Londoners what minstrel shows (some of you may not be old enough to remember these!) did for the image of black people…

they don’t and nor does Britain. a while back I remember reading in the Guardian social section about some domestic violence charity worker in East London saying that young boys and men in London were being negatively influenced by Eastenders to the point they thought it was genuinely acceptable to use violence whenever you didn’t get what you wanted. This was many years before the current hysteria over knife/gun crime…

Even the prisons correspondent Erwin James said Eastenders gave people a impression you could do violent crime and go HMP and it wasn’t a big problem and your family could visit easily when the reality is that VO’s aren’t easy to get. I’m not even sure if people genuinely want to always see extremely harsh/negative stuff – I know as a kid / teen growing up in the 70s/80s there were a lot of TV shows aimed at our age group or young adults – which although by the 80s dealt with controversial or gritty issues they didn’t actually glorify bad behaviour…

I have absolutely no problem with news or documentaries handling hard subjects (when I did watch telly I watched crime shows and war documentaries all the time) – I it is our right and duty in a free country for our media to report bad news – but I do think our drama shows set a very bad example..

also because of the last 20 years trend towards method acting you are often actually seing “life imitating art” and actors from these shows getting busted for the same domestic violence and anti social behaviour what they portray on screen..

I think Ofcom should make some rule that if the writers feel they persistently want a negative story line (i.e something with serious crime/domestic violence etc) especially for somewhere like Christmas the production companies have to pay several thousand quid into a big pot of money

but then this pot of money is then given back to the broadcasters on the strict condition it is used for things such as getting new talent in broadcasting, commissioning science and nature documentaries….

people might call it “limiting” free speech and expression but I don’t see it as any worse than a swear box collecting money for charity…

I watch Hollyoaks [looks at the ground] i get ripped for this so much lol.

Haha, don’t worry, Laura. I think we all do … secretly ¬.¬

danny dyer is apparently in talks to join eastenders AHAHAHHAAAHAHA

hahahahah yeah i hope he goes on it

now if DD was in eastdepressers I’d watch it, a secret crush kind a thing, wrong I know but…… :hopeless:

you found me out,

I do however love DOT – shes so wicked, I even painted my kitchen yellow and purple once to be like hers (no joke)