Singing Detective Gogglebox

Yes, we’ve all indulged when we should have been viewing something better — those families and couples with their feet up on the furniture, munching unhealthy snacks, watching TV and making banal comments, hardly at the Brian Sewell level of critical acumen. But this kind of trashy entertainment is addictive, like monosodium glutamate in food, and no one is immune.

So Gogglebox has endured and gone the way of all reality TV, and like Big Brother, Love Island, Made in Chelsea, whatever, it has become a construct where the producers know what they want and manage the shooting to obtain that result. I can imagine the directors doing cutaway reactions, getting the protagonists to badly fake ‘surprise’, ‘wonder’, ‘outrage’ — or to say ‘Oh my God!’ when Glenn Close comes out of the bath in Fatal Attraction, even though we’ve all seen it at least twenty times before.

I had my own idea for a variation: MetaGogglebox, where people are filmed watching Gogglebox, and then the people watching the people watching Gogglebox are filmed…Yes, I know, I’ve seen Synecdoche, New York one too many times…But then another idea, slightly more sensible, occurred to me when writing my novel-in-progress…Suppose there existed in some other reality an intellectual version the programme, where people drank fine claret and talked about their television viewing in much more exalted terms…? So I created a chapter where the greatest TV drama serial ever comes under scrutiny — Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, no less.

What follows is not an extract from the work, but a bit of fun with ideas suggested by my writing. Imagine an upmarket media couple, sat in the lounge of their six-bedroom house in Hampstead, glasses of Haut-Médoc in hand…

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