|The TV Portrait of Computers - Continued



                            by Freak of NFA

I typed this little one to follow on from what Keˇ was saying, but on a
slightly different note, with a few corrections, and some debatable bits
too so YOU can write in...

I don't think it's the problem of Actors and Script-Writers being out of
touch, although admittedly it does happen.  I think the reason that THAT
specific episode of The Bill seemed crap to us sceners is that we are
all familiar with the terminology, whereas those watching the programme
are not necessarily going to be bang up-to-date on their scene lingo.
We thought it crap but you've got to remember that it asn't actually
MADE specifically for US, you have to take into account the fact that
Britain is slow to take new ideas onboard, it's one of the things that
makes Britain great (some call it "tradition") but at times it can be a
bloody frustrating thing indeed!

The kid in the episode was not killed simply because of what he was
doing, i.e. cracking and selling games (Funny, but he must also have had
a CD-Pressing machine to do some of tht stuff!), he was killed because
he let his computer work HIM instead of the other way round, became the
sort of chap we'd call "a right little shit", and the guy selling the
stuff for him just lost his temper.  Unfortunately The Bill's script-
writers implied that the computers were solely to blame, which (getting
nicely back to Keˇ's article) is rediculous.

A similar situation exists in books, as I pointed out to Phil!/Neř a
while ago.  Dean Koonz (for example) insists on calling a disk a "floppy
diskette" and a drive a "floppy drive".  While these names are indeed
very exact and perfectly correct, the are hardly the cutting edge of
technology and so their more modern "slang" names should be used.  For
another example, not everybody calls an Optical Drive a "floptical" as
they've not got used to the idea of them yet, and so (for the moment!)
the term "Optical Drive" would be perfectly acceptable in an episode of
"The Bill".

To get back to that episode, you could rewrite several of the lines in
more modern terminology thus:

"Is he on any Bulletin boards?" ->  "Is he on any BBS's"
                                    "Is he on any Boards?"

But of course not everybody would know what the hell you were on about
and the episode would probably take a nose-dive in the eyes of umpteem
million viewers as opposed to one million Amiga owners, you go for the
hightest rating group in TV!

Incidently, I couldn't help noticing that the kid helping the police
was asked "Where would he keep the importnt stuff?" and replied "On the
PC" - despite the fact that there were at least three of them...

I mean come ON!  How many 15-yr old kids do YOU know who:

        a)  Can Crack a Game?
        b)  Can reproduce the exact packaging of a commercial
            Product without arousing anybody's suspicions?
        c)  Have THREE PC's in their bedroom?
        d)  Manage ALL of the above and STILL keep their mum from
            going into their bedroom?

Do you remember the program (I forget what it was called) on C4 about
the hackers who were buated and what have you?  THEIR room was a spare
room in a house, wall-to-wall Amiga's (just like NFA-WHQ!), grubby disks
piled high, and MORE IMPORTANTLY - Empty packing boxes that usually come
wrapped round 500 blank disks, the very same ones I used to have kicking
around because Sceners rarely throw stuff out!

Perhaps The Bill should have taked a closer look at that doccy...

But we digress, the point is that TV Producers and Writers alike are not
in sufficient touch with the tiny worlds that they're trying to bring
into their work in order to portray them successfully.

The other point in Keˇ's article is that of the TV and media only
showing us (Or rather Joe P.  Ublic) the shadey uses of computers.  This
all boils down to viewing figures again, after all who would watch a
documentary about how Flower Arranging is made easier using computers of
how a Leisure Centre keeps track of everything using a computer?  These
are (well, I'm not sure about the flowers ;-) real uses for computers
but the point is that they're not sensationalistic enough to grab the
interest of the public at large, and so the TV & Media ignore them.

How about a Bill episode in which a gang or Car Theives/Strippers is
caught because parts from a dodgy vehicle (a cut-n-shut perhaps?) were
traced using a revolutionary new Country-Wide database that takes the
data from all the Police Forces and cross-references it with the pooter
at the DVLC?  It's plausible but they won't touch it simply because it
won't generate sufficiant interest, sad really!

Yes, I'd like to see a programme dedicated to the fun use of computers
as well, and not just some tosh like Lamesmaster or Sad Influence.
Demos are an art form, we have Top of the pops so why not a computer
version of the same thing?

Imagine if a 1-hour program was split into three 20-minute sections, one
each for PC, Amiga, and everything else!  Can you imagine how the sales
of Amigas would go if people saw just what the machine could DO?  Link
it with a good PD-House (17-Bit?) so that people could actually BUY the
stuff as well, and you'd have a top-rated TV show!

I've seen PC demos, they're poo...  Trust me.

It's sad that people are only interested when it's the bad stuff that's
being portrayed on the screen or in the pages, and I think it's kind of
indicative of the decline in morals and intellect of the population.  If
people didn't watch/read cack then nobody would produce it, mind you, we
all thought that about computer games...