With both The Great British Bake Off and Strictly Come Dancing running at the moment we are in Reality TV saturation mode. It’s not just the main shows that demand time it’s the spin-off ones as well. The Bake Off has An Extra Slice where comedienne Jo Brand takes a light-hearted look at the week’s events in the tent and Strictly not only has the results show on a Sunday but every night from Monday to Friday it has a half hour It Takes Two. If you watch the main show then you have to watch all the others.
Bake Off is a must for us as we are both into baking and like to see what we can try our hands at next. I curse and swear at handling pastry and Debbie has difficulty working the oven, but we persist. The programme also inspired us to hold The Great Amwaj Bake Off which has been an annual event for the last six years, where we invite a load of our friends to our house to “show us your bakes”. A certain editor’s wife was so good she won it the first two years, so we had to make her a judge to ensure she could not win. In the tent the contestants this year are an eclectic lot but timid little Rahul the class of the field.
We do not normally watch Strictly, but this year The Cat from Red Dwarf aka Danny John Jules is in it and so as a massive Red Dwarf fan I feel it is my duty to watch and cheer him on. He should do well because he started off as a dancer in West End shows and as we know well from the Dwarf he is a superb mover. There are some other good dancers this year as well as the obligatory thumpers, so it should be a good laugh.
It’s a far cry from when we arrived in Bahrain in the 80s and 90s when the only TV channels you could watch were Bahrain 55 and Aramco 33 and you needed a rotating ariel to switch between the two. I remember my first week in Bahrain, not knowing anyone. I was surprised to see a James Bond movie on Bahrain 55 on Friday night. I cannot remember which one it was but I do remember that Bond films normally last around two hours. This one was finished in 40 minutes. That was when I discovered that I had moved to a country with a quite different culture. I have of course come to love the culture and society and do know that there are many aspects the West could learn from.
With IPTV and VPN it is now almost impossible for governments to censor TV and movies but that’s not to say that we should allow anything to go, especially if we have children in the house. The responsibility to monitor what is shown in our own homes now comes down to ourselves. We can put the telly out of bounds when we are not there, but remember when we were told lights out and we would read our comics under the covers with a torch? It’s exactly the same now but it’s an iPad and their streaming Youtube.