-eND-: On more crap tv

So

There's very little to watch on .za tv on a Sunday, particularly in the morning. There's all the various Jesus stuff, obviously, and occasionally there is something watchable on Discovery or The Beeb, but that's only occasionally. It's frightening that even with our satellite dish, there is very little which I find watchable whenever I'm parked in front of the IQ-sucking tv.

I believe it was The Boss who observed that there were 57 channels with nothing on. I'm rather fond of him and I quote that little bit fairly frequently. As a result of a complete lack of anything approaching generally good on radio, I find it ironically amusing when his recent hit Radio Nowhere gets airtime. Good bit of social commentary from the man, I thought, and no more
acutely observed than in the two things which are supposed to be the mainstay of information and entertainment.

That's another story, though; this is just a bitch about tv, and its 57 channels with nothing on. One thing there is, though, is DeafTv - programming for deaf people.

Fair enough, I thought, the first time I chanced upon this bit of "entertainment." I watched it for a bit, then it lost what tenuous grip it had on my butterfly-on-crack moderated demand for viewing pleasure and I surfed on to bitch about something else.

I chanced upon DTv several times and saw several aspects of it as time passed. They seems to focus mostly on the deaf environment and there is a lot of deaf politics on there as well, usually with uplifiting stories peppered about the place, and is not terribly entertaining. I saw this a few times before it occurred to me... do deaf people really want nothing more than to hear (er...) about other deaf people?

I mean, do people with lung cancer just want story after story about lung cancer, followed by lung cancer news and then the politics of lung cancer in that someone was unfairly dismissed from work because s/he had lung cancer and how the human rights people got him/her the job back? Do people with AIDS want to only hear about AIDS? It seems gay guys are more than
happy to only hear about other gay guys, judging by the occasional gay lifestyle magazine I've browsed, but do the deaf only want that as well?

I suspect that if I were as deaf as a post and I had two hours a week of viewing aimed solely at me (in that it's entirely simulcast with someone signing in the corner and it has subtitles), I think I'd rather have a signed-and-subbed Bruce Willis movie, or a stand-up comedy routine, not some dull quasi public-access nonsense. It's supposed to be entertaining, after all. Especially if I had to get up at 6am to watch the fucking thing.

Fuck you, DeafTV.

-eND-