The collective noun for TV talking heads

The BBC documentary ‘Roxy Music – A Musical History’ achieved something quite remarkable. The remarkable thing was this: it made a tragic, middle-aged Roxy fan boy like me turn off after about ten minutes. Had I kept watching, I’m afraid I might have ended up breaking something in our living room.

Some folk in TV land must think that a definitive template for quality has been established by programmes like ‘The nation’s 100 favourite telly adverts’ or ‘The greatest-ever soap villains’, wherein a bunch of well-worn video clips are assembled for the purpose of showcasing the ‘witty’ and ‘off-the-cuff’ observations of C-list celebrities. You can tell from their eyes that, generally speaking, these TV talking heads don’t know (or care) much about the subject matter; they’re just reacting to clips they’ve been shown five minutes before. 

One of the reasons that online content is often more interesting than TV content is that the folk who make the online stuff usually care (sometimes to the point of insanity) about their subject matter. A talking head on TV, by contrast, only really cares about being a talking head on TV. Such a person will dream of the money shot, the moment they’ll coin a phrase so cute, pithy and resonant that they’ll be hired to do a whole bunch more talking head stuff on shows like ‘Britain’s Weirdest Game Show Contestants.’

I generally avoid this kind of programme, but felt that I could not pass up the chance to watch an hour devoted to one of my favourite bands. Alas, merely 600 seconds into the show, having absorbed a series of blows, all of which sign-posted the grim direction of travel, I had to reach for the remote and terminate my participation with extreme prejudice. Maybe I should have watched the whole thing before writing this review, but those 600 seconds contained quite enough inanity for me to get the gist, featuring as it did some world-class superficiality from Sadie Frost, Shaun Ryder, Alan McGee, Sian Pattenden and Emma Dabiri (no … me neither).

The commentary seemed neither apposite nor insightful, but what made it worse was that some of it was used DURING THE SONGS, the director clearly having interpreted each of the instrumental passages as an opportunity to insert analysis like this:

"Bryan Ferry wore glitter on his eyes.”

And this:

"The instruments all had a part to play in the Roxy sound.”

To anyone interested in finding out about a fantastic band, my advice would be to avoid this programme. Instead, do yourself a favour and check out some old clips on youtube. At least that way, you won’t have to encounter a phenomenon which surely deserves a collective noun, preferably something pejorative and judgemental to reflect its pestilential vapidity.

How about a jabbering of TV talking heads? That sounds about right.

There ... I’ve done something useful with the time I could have spent shouting at the television. 

Roxy Music, live in 1973. 

You can check out any time you like (but you can never leave).

Watching the news and social media responses to the Brexit negotiations makes me wonder what people expected from a process that was bound to be complicated, painful, protracted and prone to brinkmanship. The level of ineptitude shown by the British Government may have surprised people, but it doesn’t account for the catastrophising zeal of those commentators who consistently attempt to invalidate or sabotage both the goal and the process of the negotiations. 

One of the juiciest cherries atop this absurd cake is the acknowledgement by Scotland's First Minister that the 35 Scottish Nationalist MPs at Westminster will back any proposals for a second referendum on the Brexit terms. One must accept that nationalists will, by definition, view everything through the prism of their desire for independence; with that in mind, it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to imagine a situation in which Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum might have resulted in a similar melodrama.     

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which that independence referendum had resulted in a narrow win for the Yes team. There would have been all kinds of heated discussion about the future, with just under half of the population dismayed by the result and just over half in a state approaching euphoria. Many within the Yes movement would have been elated, but some might also have urged a note of caution about the challenges lying ahead, perhaps considering it foolish to assume that it would be easy to dissolve a 300-year old partnership.

Our First Minister would have had to appoint armies of civil servants to deal with the many complexities of what, for the purpose of this flight of fancy, we'll call Scoxit.

There would, surely, have been questions over border controls, currency, share of national debt, location of key businesses, ownership of assets etc. Perhaps, given the closeness of the result, there might even have been some division within the independence movement. Hard line Scoxiteers might have argued for immediate secession from rump UK with as little compromise as possible; others may have reasoned that the hopes, fears and aspirations of the half of the population which did not vote ‘Yes’ would have to be taken into account during the negotiations.

Imagine, on the losing side, that a group of rich and influential people (bankers, politicians, business folk, cultural taste-makers) started to cavil about the result. Imagine that their default line of attack was that the Scottish electorate had been ‘duped’ and did not understand the complexities of the issues concerned. These low-information voters, it might have been argued, were forcing us to break up a successful partnership that had endured for centuries. That Scoxit vote, portrayed by some as essentially anti-English and driven by ‘blood and soil’ xenophobia would have to be overturned; a second referendum (or, if you will, a peoples’ vote) would be required.

The discerning reader might consider this to be a dismally low-resolution interpretation of a binary vote, but let us imagine for the moment that such a fanciful notion somehow had the power to gain some traction in the public consciousness.  

As the deadline for the Scoxit settlement loomed, one could envisage the negotiations stalling, perhaps snagging on technicalities and conflicting interpretations of some of the terms contained within the Act of Union. The First Minister would have been caught between a rock (the ‘Stop Scoxit’ movement, agitating for a second referendum, but perhaps willing to consent to a settlement involving as little disruption to the Union as possible) and a hard place (the Scoxiteers, insistent that a newly-independent Scotland should not be bound by rules, terms and conditions dictated by Westminster).

Aiming to maintain a conciliatory approach to an increasingly divisive issue, let us imagine that the beleaguered First Minister might have flown to London to present a compromise deal, one which –arguably- contained just enough juice for both parties to accept, allowing us to get on with the business of forging effective links between Scotland and rump UK. Imagine that this plan was quickly rejected by the Westminster negotiating team and that the First Minister was sent homeward to think again.  

Weary of being traduced for their ‘stupidity’, their ‘ignorance’ and their ‘xenophobia’, it is not difficult to imagine that Yes voters would have started to fear that the prize they had won was going to be denied by intransigence in London. Many would have been angry about a ‘foreign’ power deigning to grant secession only on terms that seemed unduly punitive.     

There is, of course, a possibility that those voters might have weighed up the stalled negotiations, the slights to their First Minister, the endless slanders and calls for a ‘peoples’ vote’ and thought:

"Well ... this is rather more hassle than we expected. Maybe all those celebrities are right; perhaps we should just have another vote."

Or perhaps they would have taken a deep breath and said:

"Now, perhaps, some of you are beginning to understand why we wanted to leave the UK. We were asked a question and we gave you a clear instruction; now, please, give us what we voted for."

Given the circumstances, which of those responses would have been more likely?

To ask that question is to know the answer.