Chances are that, when you woke up this morning, you realised you’d been suddenly implanted into a hellishly bleak post-apocalyptic dystopia. That’s OK, because so did I. So did everyone, in fact, and it’s all down to Channel 4.
On Wednesday, you see, Channel 4 did the unthinkable. It announced that it was going to shut its youth channel E4 for the duration of 7 May, in the hope that this would encourage the youngest wedge of the electorate to get up and vote. Which, no matter how you look at it, proves that Channel 4 is essentially a military-industrial crypto-democratic broadcaster.
Hey, Channel 4, if you want me to vote that much, why don’t you just send one of your stormtroopers to my front door and get them to frogmarch me to my nearest polling station? Because that’s the same thing. You know that the only real alternative to watching a dozen How I Met Your Mother repeats in a row is for us to run into the streets screaming until we accidentally clatter into a polling booth.
Oh sure, you’ll say, we could always just switch over and watch a dozen Friends repeats in a row on Comedy Central instead. But that’s not the same. It’s kind of the same. But it’s not the same.
What a dangerous move this is, especially since Channel 4’s target audience is naturally left-leaning. If everyone who usually spends their days watching The Big Bang Theory was forced out to vote by a lack of anything else to do, we’ll be plunged into the nightmarish reality of a socialist government come 8 May. And worse still, other broadcasters are bound to follow suit in order to balance the vote.
Right now, I fully expect that Nigel Farage is on the phone to Freeview cable channel Dave (“the home of witty banter”), hoping they can shore up his ailing campaign. “Guys, you’ve got to stop broadcasting,” he’ll plead. “Without endless recycled Top Gear episodes to watch, our supporters will be forced to look elsewhere for their witty banter. And everyone knows that the only thing that can even come close to matching a decade-old repeat of Top Gear in terms of witty banter is a dank polling booth set up in an abandoned church hall on a drizzly Thursday afternoon.”
At this point, things will snowball out of control. Anyone with even the slightest vested interest in the outcome of this election will begin to systematically strip away every possible alternative to voting.
First it was E4. Next, for all anybody knows, it’ll be Google, removing all of the internet except for a Google map of your nearest polling station. Or the Bauer Media group deleting all of Heat magazine’s pictures of fat celebrities in bikinis and replacing them with the full text of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas.
Or Kellogg’s fastidiously replacing all the cornflakes from its boxes and replacing them with tiny plastic Tory party logos that you’ll choke on and go to hospital and be treated by a legion of nurses in terrifying blank-faced Jeremy Hunt masks.
This is the only logical endpoint to Channel 4’s decision. That or everyone just switching over to Comedy Central and watching Friends instead. Either way, not in my name.
