This morning, I'm sitting here in bed working on photos I took yesterday on my laptop and listening to a "documentary" in the background. This show somehow has managed to trip up on two of the things that irritate me the most about TV, so I'm going to share.
First off, the show is about ghosts, haunted places, etc. Okay, fine, I can deal with that - what irritates the hell out of me, though, is the assumption that I as the viewer am going to go along with the notion that this is an opinion-neutral show. It's plainly trying to convince me that this place is really really haunted and presents all sorts of evidence in the form of rhetorical questions about whether or not it could be true.
What irritates me the most about that is that it's fundamentally dishonest entertainment masquerading as a documentary, much like watching most mainstream news programs come to think of it.
The other thing that annoys me a lot about this show is a narrating convention I see from time to time in actual real documentaries. For some reason, it often seems that the primary offenders are British historians, or to be fair, historians with a British accent. I love the British, but their historians need to just knock this off.
When you're talking about something that happened in the past, the correct way to refer to it is in PAST TENSE. Referring to a sequence of events that happened six hundred years ago in sequential order, in present tense may perhaps be gramatically correct, however, when one is contrasting that with current events, not only is it incorrect, it's often confusing. Determining cause and effect when the narrative is temporally neutral is something that these people should not be asking me to do on my day off.
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