Satire, fiction, drama, reality, politics, all just seem to be merging into one muddle of a genre.
Scotland’s The Herald, routinely published their TV listings for the week as most papers do, as an act of loyalty to the past. The TV listings seem to exist in 2017 so people cast a quick eye over them before recalling we use our phones for everything and remembering the time of a film on Wednesday will prove next to impossible, so streaming it immediately is the only real option.
But let it never again be said that TV listings are mundane, not when you have Damien Love of The Herald, crafting masterpieces from mayhem.
Love in alerting his readership to the week’s scheduling, describes the twilight zone of the American inauguration and pens an eloquent description of a farce, the exact one many of us feel we have been living since November.
The award for trolliest TV Guide listing ever goes to Scotland's Sunday Herald….brilliant!!! Unfortunately now Trump will invade Scotland pic.twitter.com/Msk9Wc659v
— Scott Wryn (@scottwrynn) January 15, 2017
The full text reads;
President Trump: The Inauguration
4pm, BBC One/ STV
After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is the “What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War” setting – but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present.
The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible.
Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.
Whether Damian Love ran this by his editor or whether he acted a lone wolf with a mission to satirically entertain is yet to be discerned.
And lest we forget, our own RTÉ’s TV guide listing of 2016, where they inadvertently revealed their institutional sentiments towards Queen Elizabeth. Scheduled just after Top of the Pops Christmas and just before Shrek, RTÉ squeezed in a spikey zing, another unexpected stroke of jibing genius.
We think more anarchy amongst TV listings writers would be a comfort to us all in these times of twilight.
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