It's Been A While Since I Ranted About A Lynx Ad
Posted 9 March 2009 in Television by Catriona
We’ve just seen the new Lynx advertisement, with the little claymation cave dwellers, one of whom finds an aerosol can of the new Lynx fragrance hidden inside a rock, or something along those lines.
(Of course, they may not have dwelt in caves. They may have been any other kind of early human, but mentioning cave dwellers allows me to fondly remember the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of Cave Dwellers, otherwise known as Ator L’Invincible 2, which was not only hilarious—“It was the most unrealistic puppet he’d ever fought”—but also starred the genuinely charming Miles O’Keeffe. “How much O’Keeffe? Miles O’Keeffe!” But that’s beside the point.)
The ad. led to this conversation (and, yes, Nick is often this bombastic in the flesh):
NICK: Do my eyes deceive me?
ME: Sorry?
NICK: Was that actually a relatively inoffensive Lynx ad.?
ME: Well, sort of. It’s still kind of . . .
NICK: Yeah . . .
ME: But when they’re little claymation people, it’s less date-rapey.
So maybe that’s a lesson you can take on board, Lynx? Even someone who despises your advertisements as much as I do somehow finds them less offensive when the female protagonists look like animated Bratz dolls from the brief and ill-fated “Don’t We All Secretly Want A Caveman?” range.
I don’t know whether that’s an indictment of me or of you, actually.
Share your thoughts [16]
1
Drew wrote at Mar 10, 11:00 pm
Ah, what wonderful things I miss by not watching television.
2
Catriona wrote at Mar 11, 06:47 am
On a side note, we need a way to distinguish between two different forms of “television.”
I know when you say that you “don’t watch television,” Drew, that you mean you don’t watch things when they’re available episodically on free-to-air transmission, but prefer to watch them at your leisure on DVD (which is largely but not exclusively how Nick and I watch).
But some people when they say they “don’t watch television” mean they wouldn’t watch anything produced for the small screen because it is necessarily a common and degenerate medium.
Which always annoys me.
I know you don’t mean that, because you do watch television programmes, just not when they’re on television.
I want a way to distinguish between the two kinds of “not watching television.”
3
Drew wrote at Mar 11, 09:54 pm
yes, to clarify, I love many television programmes, I just refuse to watch them live as you say. I find I no longer record and watch later as I used to years ago, instead I rent, borrow or buy and watch on a season by season basis. This means that generally the only time I see commericals are at the cinema where I usually find them entertaining because I have not been exposed to them before. It sounds a little elitist perhaps, it’s not meant to be, I have never liked TVs being on just for the sake of them being on.
I did, however, youtube the Lynx commericals after reading your “rant” I can see why they bother you.
4
Catriona wrote at Mar 11, 10:06 pm
Well, I don’t find your perspective elitist, because you do watch television. And I don’t have a problem with people who don’t watch television at all, really. I do have a problem with openly and frequently expressed opinions about the lack of quality in television programmes.
(My father is a repeat offender. He frequently insists that all American television is rubbish, despite not watching any. He usually insists this immediately after I’ve just mentioned enjoying an American show. This annoys me.)
There’s an enormous amount of rubbish on television. There’s also an enormous amount of rubbish produced for the cinema, so I think it’s a shame to miss out on, say, Deadwood or Arrested Development or Green Wing because Big Brother was a waste of time.
It also depends on how you watch television. We often pick up our television-watching habits from our childhood, and I know we never, ever just had the television on as background noise when I was a child. I still don’t. And it’s extremely uncommon for me to have it on during the day—in fact, I don’t watch daytime television at all, though I (very occasionally) watch a DVD while doing busywork like folding laundry.
So for me, always, television was a social event. We all sat down and we all watched the same programme together. And we still do that.
There’s nothing wrong, I think, in doing it the other way, but they are two very different ways of approaching television.
5
Wendy wrote at Mar 12, 07:52 am
Great thread…so many ways of engaging with television…and I have to say I love them all in different ways…distracted, intensely focussed, socially, individually, the dvd binge, the live events…and i think even what we all call “rubbish” (which can vary greatly from person to person and is a question of taste) is valuable and interesting in its own unique way. For instance Big Brother was a waste of time in one sense, but it also demonstrated a lot about the “occupation of time” on television in another way…its banality, its liveness, its flow of boring images juxtaposed with contrived spectacle and what some liked to characterise as its “immorality”. If it taught us nothing else it was that the off button still exists on remote controls and we still do have the power to exercise our right to use it. This is the landscape of television in microcosm.
(Of course after the first two series…it just became plain repetitive…and I was ready to move on to something else.)
I’ll stop now…or we’ll all be reading my thesis and no one needs to be subjected to that against their will.
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Catriona wrote at Mar 12, 08:03 am
Wendy, as soon as I wrote “because Big Brother was a waste of time,” I remembered the first season, and how incredibly excited discourse analysts were that all of a sudden Channel 10 was broadcasting (and streaming on the web) hours and hours and hours of free, unmediated conversation, which was just unprecedented.
What I should have said there was “because you (in the sense of the generic second-person pronoun) found Big Brother a waste of time,” but I was dashing out the door, so I left it as is.
And even if you (in the sense of the generic second-person pronoun) didn’t like Big Brother, as I didn’t, it did have a radical impact on the shape of television. I just prefer my telly scripted, because real people are often quite boring, especially in large doses. I know I am, and I don’t want to spend my leisure time watching that.
Social television watching is something I’ve not thought about much, and yet it’s something I do a great deal of: we always gather in large groups to watch the new Doctor Who episodes and to discuss them afterwards, and have since the new series started—and now, of course, we go on to discuss them on here, too, which is a kind of social television watching by proxy with a much larger, more fluid, and more abstract social group.
I’d never thought about it in those terms before.
7
Drew wrote at Mar 12, 08:29 am
I prefer scripted television also, as I have no doubt said before, there is nothing worse than when actors actually use words they came up with themselves and not written for them by a trained professional.
God that sounds so elitist, lol.
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Wendy wrote at Mar 12, 08:32 am
and (now I’m talking off the top of my head) that when tv first appeared it would have been an intensely social experience…I’m sure there’s lots written about this (i may have even read it and forgotten)…perhaps this aspect of tv watching waned in the intervening years but may make a greater return as people crave more “social” experiences that aren’t technologically mediated…where we are isolated yet connected by net applications..if that is how i understand “social media”. In this sense television has the potential offer a different social media experience to things like twitter and facebook etc. I listened to a paper at the 2000 TV conference at UQ where Will Brooker (i think..memory fading) came up with the concept of “overflow” to describe the process by which the watching of certain programs (he used Dawson’s Creek I think) then continued on into other internet disucssion forums (he was extending on Raymond Williams’ famous concept of “televisual flow)…or blogs…in these ways i think we can see how television threads through our lives beyond the moment of interaction with the screen. That’s its powerful force… and what I find interesting about it anyway.
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Catriona wrote at Mar 12, 12:33 pm
Unfortunately, Drew, many of the “trained professionals” who write for film and television are pretty bad, too. I’m always thrilled when a television programme puts as much time and money into the script as it does into the production and the stars’ salaries—as Deadwood did, for example.
I think you’re right, Wendy—I don’t know anything about it personally, but you see footage, for example, of people sitting around together to watch the moon landing. Of course, television must have been a fairly expensive technology, then, where now the basic technology is one of the cheaper ones. But, then, as televisions become bigger and more expensive, maybe that social aspect will flow back in—one family has a big telly and everyone draws around that to watch a special event? Or have we reached a point where we all want big tellies?
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Nick Caldwell wrote at Mar 12, 12:41 pm
As broadcast television slowly implodes through forces such as Bittorrent and legitimate remediation tools such as ABC’s iView, it’s possible that the use of television as a social medium — as you describe it, Wendy — may also dissipate. Television texts become just another network experience like Twitter.
On the other hand, it may be simply that social groups become more deliberate in their consumption of television – just as we do with Doctor Who, by gathering together, setting times to watch, establishing shared reading protocols (no spoilers!). When TV is no longer a flow, audiences need to — in fact, may want to — do the work of channelling the streams together for themselves.
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Wendy wrote at Mar 12, 09:18 pm
i think what TV is slowly moving towards is multiple flows….it’s flowing all over the place, proliferating across a broad spectrum of technologies giving it’s audiences more choice of when and how to engage with it. So you’re right I think Nick…“it’s TV Jim but not as we know it” (is that the right STar Trek reference…you all know I am a science fiction beginner!)…but I also think it will retain it’s sense of the shared social experience…even if its “socials” also proliferate into smaller less easily identifiable audiences than was the case for broadcast TV where we all knew everything was watching the same thing at the same time because there were no other options…like you say Catriona we may have to work harder to retain that aspect of it…so that a little kernel of past modes of TV watching will continue to survive into the present (now I’m getting all walter benjamin)
I don’t know if everyone wants a big TV…but it seems that we are only offered that choice…if it can be called a choice…it’s big or bigger screens at the moment in all the shops
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Catriona wrote at Mar 12, 10:15 pm
That’s the right Star Trek reference, Wendy!
I have no evidence to support this, of course, because this is simply not my field, but I do think that the way Drew explicitly says he watches television (and, as I say, Nick and I do the same thing) is actually of huge advantage to television as a medium.
Because all of a sudden (or over the last decade, anyway), television studios have discovered that they can make an enormous amount of money out of DVD sales.
There was always a trickle of video sales for some television programmes: I have some original Doctor Who on video, as does Nick (of course). But nothing like the quantity we see (and have) now. Now, the expectation is that the television programme will be released on DVD.
So studios are finding a vast new source of revenue, and I think that’s a big factor in how much money they’re starting to spend on some television productions.
Well, that and the cost of the premium American cable channels that are producing shows such as Dexter and Deadwood.
13
Matthew Smith wrote at Mar 13, 01:21 am
Steph and I used to only watch certain television because we knew it was popular amongst friends and colleagues and didn’t want to be excluded from the discourse surrounding those programs. Recently, as more people are watching disparate television, it is harder to start a conversation about telly in the lunchroom – much more like popular music or books. We have less and less shared culture as we are able to choose our media consumption. The only thing left is news but only major and local news events are shared as even our choice of news sources is disparate (e.g. world news is less likely to be discussed). Does this mean we are all turning into solipsists?
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Catriona wrote at Mar 13, 04:00 am
I’ve always been a solipsist.
No, that’s fascinating, Matt, because I’ve found the opposite happening. But I may be creating that situation artificially, because one of my main hobbies—as you know—is trying to convince people to watch what I’m watching, so then we can talk about it.
Fortunately, I’m quite persuasive.
And other people do the same thing, so I end up watching fascinating things that I would never have come across, like the first season of Slings and Arrows, which Drew just lent us and which was fabulous, or Skins, which I haven’t watched yet, but also hope to borrow from Drew.
15
Drew wrote at Mar 13, 08:00 am
I haven’t given you Skins? Sorry will have to remendy that. My experience is about 1/2 in between what you and Matt are describing. With this circle of friends I either have or will watch everything you point me towards, but at work it’s different. It’s hard to find people who have watched and enjoyed Deadwood for example, but then I would expect that anyway. I don’t watch many of the shows that they watch also.
And Television shows on DVD, a wonderful thing.
16
Catriona wrote at Mar 13, 08:27 am
You haven’t given us Skins, no—but this wasn’t meant to be a passive-aggressive reminder. I would like to see it.
I, too, know some people whose suggestions I’m less inclined to listen to, because we just don’t overlap much in terms of our tastes and interests. What they’re recommending may be excellent, but there are some genres and forms in which I have little interest, and with so much stuff in which I am interested out there, I’m disinclined to experiment.
You can trust me, though. I’m an excellent recommender of things.
(Television on DVD may be my favourite thing in the whole world right now.)