Whilst we indulge ourselves in nationalistic posturing, as we celebrate the nationalities of the Grammy, Oscar and BAFTA winners, and we soberly watch documentaries about the martyrdoms of Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz, we suddenly all find ourselves as Spartacus, when something worth downloading again perks its cheeky head into the schedules, as in the case of Better Call Saul, the follow-up to Vince Gillian’s acclaimed Breaking Bad.
I particularly liked the latter, especially its morality aspect, and I count myself amongst the multitudes eager to repeat the acquaintance of characters I had got to know. In addition, in the UK this is available through Netflix, who also broadcast Breaking Bad and House of Cards. Netflix charges £5.99 to £11.99 per month for its content which amounts to £71.99 to £143.99 per year. Netflix currently serves 2.25 million customers and posted profits of £32 million pounds. If I add Game of Thrones, Hannibal, Penny Dreadful, True Detective, Girls and Boardwalk Empire this will set me back an additional £252 pounds a year from Sky. Then there’s the BBC License of £145.50 a year. If I also add LoveFilm from Amazon and get The Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black, The Vampire Diaries, and Vikings I will need to find another £95.88 a year.
So, for my investment of £637.86 a year I get transgressive morality drama, zombie survival, political machination, procedural crime, gothic fantasy, serial killer soap opera, lesbian prison drama, period crime and dark ages beefcake. Even if I restrict myself to just the top shows in my mega package and say one feature film a week from the thousands on offer, and maybe one sports game from my several exclusive sport’s packages, this means I will need to make a time commitment of at least two and a half hours a day to keep abreast of the additional content I have bought. Things like reading, watching the news or documentaries, meeting people, all need separate scheduling, and who knows when I will have time for Facebook, Skype or Twitter.
As the pay walls grow higher and the content available more seductive, hyper-real and attractive, I find that I will need to work overtime to keep up with the competing scheduling. None of this stuff is essential, but the embedded advertisers, masquerading as journalists in the faux-independent media rave about how much I need to watch this or watch that. And unless I want to be ostracised at the water cooler at work I must work harder to share in and consume this unchallenging, bland, pre-digested homogenised culture, that inserts itself in front of my eyes in place of the reality, it pretends to represent.
As it happens, the reality of the world I live in, this constitutes about a fourteenth of my annual income. I’m more interested in why the 43 protesting trainee teachers were arrested by the police in advance of a public meeting on the behest of the wife of the mayor of Iguala in Mexico, who then handed them over to a group of professional hit-men for a Drug cartel who executed them. I’m interested in why Mark Wood starved to death, following the reduction of his health benefits after being declared fit to work by Atos. I'm interested why the British Government has made no attempt to claim tax owed by the super-rich, revealed in the leak of HSBC’s Swiss Bank, despite numerous examples of deliberate tax avoidance, by a company anxious to support the Conservative party’s re-election in 2015.
In my country, the tax and fiscal propriety of my government is continually judged wanting, with a degree of justification. We expect our leaders to be greedy, corrupt criminals and we attempt to select the most altruistic rogue from the candidates on offer. In my adoptive country, they pretend they are honest men, living by the regulation of a legal system that dispenses the same justice to all.
I fear that this is just more bullshit, from the bastards raising their paywalls to profit from our desire to indulge in fantasy, because the real world is too horrible to live in. The lies that run the real world, are probably written by the same bastards who structure the fake one. According to BARB, only 8.6 % of the TV audience, now watches news and current affairs. Within 24 hours of its release on TV, the Pirate Bay has recorded over 50, 000 downloads for the latest episode of The Walking Dead, which sees the zombie soap move into a church. When I cite these facts, my listeners shrug and say that’s the way it has always been, why worry about it? If you're not sure, ask Mark Wood. Except sorry, you're too late, you were probably watching the Walking Dead whilst he starved to death.
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