There's nothing good on telly any more.
Apart from Top Gear, House and the occasional episode of Family Guy, there's nothing decent worth watching on a day-to-day basis at the moment. Every now and then there'll be a documentary about spontaneous combustion amongst the homeless community or somesuch, but in the main it's twaddle of the very highest order.
To me, given that there is a floating viewer market looking for something to keep them entertained before the inevitable expiration of their mortal soul, it would make sense to not only make decent programmes, but to actually name and advertise them in a manner befitting both the content and ethos of the programme itself.
Sadly for the makers of "Real Rescue", such a thought process must have passed them by.
I accidentally wasted a decent portion of my evening watching this last night (mainly because there was bugger all else on) but it made me realise that the title is at least 50% lies. Put simply, there were no rescues. Let me elaborate on the stories which unfolded:
- Ship sinks in the Antarctic. You might remember this from a year or so ago, when a specially-designed ship took tourists to the Antarctic, only to get a bloody great hole in the front and everybody had to leave. Now, such was the slowness of the sinking that everybody managed to amble off and get away in lifeboats while the ship was barely listing. Indeed, video footage from the event shows tourists taking pictures of each other dolled up in life jackets while waiting to depart.
www.dictionary.com defines 'rescue' as "to free or deliver from confinement, violence, danger, or evil." and "to liberate or take by forcible or illegal means from lawful custody". Which part of calmly evacuating the ship then being picked up by other ships a few hours later actually constitutes the rescue here? Don't get me wrong, had the ship plunged at speed, or the weather was bad or they were out there for days, a rescue would have been necessary, but it didn't, it wasn't and they weren't, so it's not a rescue in the slightest. Fin.
- Caravan jack-knifes. Next, we're treated to a traffic cop zooming down the motorway to assist in the tragic tale of a caravan which jack-knifed, causing its attached car to hit the central reservation a bit. Again, don't get me wrong, it must have been shit-scary at the time and the car was a bit beaten up, but the family were completely OK and all the copper had to do was push the caravan from lane 3 to the hard shoulder. Not exactly Hollywood material is it?
- Lift gets stuck with ironic passenger. The last of the heart-rending tales of woe was a lift which had got stuck, trapping its inhabitants. "Now we're talking" I thought, as people actually needed rescuing. Cue 2 minutes of looking for the power override switch followed by them opening the doors with a master key, freeing the trapees within a couple of minutes of their arrival. Luckily, the camera crew had a bit of dramatic footage, as some apparently claustrophobic man had been squealing and clawing at the doors whilst trapped. Pardon my cynicism, but what kind of claustrophobic is only scared when trapped, rather than being in a confined space? Surely that's a different condition, like 'Wet-blanketitis' or somesuch. If he really was scared of confined spaces, it served him right for not taking the stairs. The lazy get.
So at the end of the day, out of 3 potentially rescue-ridden stories, we got 1 tenuously linked to the breathless title. It wasn't exactly seat-of-your-pants stuff, which leads me to think that maybe they should scale down their ambitious title to something a bit more fitting.
I'm not in marketing, but how about "Series of incredibly run-of-the-mill events set to dramatic music while emergency services waste time with people who've dropped their keys down a drain"?
It's got a certain ring to it, don't you think?
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