According to Shakespeare ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’ .  Well he would say that, being a playwright, wouldn’t he?  Allowing for poetic licence, the statement is inherently absurd since, if all the world’s a stage, who is in the audience apart from God?  Who wrote the play? And what happened to free will?

Still, we have to agree that human behaviour includes a very large element of play-acting , especially in this era of mass entertainment.  Everybody does it some of the time, if only as a matter of social expediency.  But some people do it most of the time , and some with exploitative , even sinister intentions. The performance can be clumsily unconvincing or polished and sophisticated enough to convince most people at least some of the time.

The ancient Greek word for the mask worn by a play-actor was ‘persona’;  hence the modern term ‘personality’ meaning the face one shows to the world and by which one is identified.  But in the everyday world it is obviously important to distinguish between masks and real faces ; whether we are seeing a real person or a more or less artfully-disguised one designed to deceive the unwary.  Unfortunately, the public nowadays is so saturated with mass entertainment that the division between appearance and reality has become blurred .  Thus, for example, the scenarios and behaviour in many TV productions , far from reflecting the real world, begin to influence it in more or less harmful ways.  There being a moral to every story, many undiscerning people will therefore take their cue from what they see being presented as ‘normal’ behaviour in countless TV productions.  This is most apparent in the popular ‘soap operas’ which preach modern parables of political correctness and ‘non-judgemental’ attitudes to behaviour hitherto regarded as unacceptable ; such as promiscuity, adultery, fraud, lying, stealing, welfare-sponging , alcoholism, drug-taking , violence, feminism, sexual perversions, multi-racialism and coarse language.  These are woven into most plots in the guise of ‘social realism’, and flavoured with light-hearted humour and meretricious glamour  to make the medicine go down.  If any hint of integrity intrudes it is quickly exposed as bogus or tainted with self-interest.       The older generation in particular is bemused by this depiction of the world, bearing little resemblance to the one they thought they knew from first-hand experience.       ‘Ah’ the producers say, ‘that’s because the world has changed, so you’d  better get used to it’.

Well they would, wouldn’t they?   

The fact remains that there is very little of exemplary behaviour in most of these TV and film) productions;  no doubt because it is less thrilling than devious, violent and depraved behaviour of one kind or another.   But the ‘normalising’ influence these warped productions have on people’s conduct is inevitably decadent and corrupting of social values. The strident demands for ‘artistic freedom’ heard from the producers are intended to disguise their flagrant abuse, irresponsibility and the tendentious propaganda for their own brand of politics and ‘normal’ behaviour which commonly includes all of the vices mentioned above)

Many of the role- models featured in their productions bear little relation to real people and exhibit character defects no one wants to find in their own circle of relatives, friends and acquaintances. And the associated glamour and pseudo-realism are derisory to anyone with feet firmly planted in the real world .  Step back ‘Commander Bond’ ; step forward an actor whose only experience of command was a Glasgow milk-float.  And by the way, how many glamorous females have you actually encountered as senior police officers, forensic pathologists, prominent lawyers or professors ?  Not a lot, if only because glamour sells a lot better in other occupations such as modelling and entertainment.

But of course the film industry and TV agencies are awash with female glamour ; hence all the ‘bimbos’ shoe-horned into traditionally male roles, and all the would-be actresses crowding TV advertisements.

A similar disparity is seen in the gratuitous and incongruous insertion of blacks in roles they very seldom occupy in the real world , and in numbers out of all proportion to their numbers in the population.  Like the fairly recent appointment of a black Archbishop and a black Chief Constable, these propaganda stunts are manifestly insulting to the far more numerous and better qualified indigenous candidates .  One need only check the number of obviously eligible indigenous candidates against the odds of  finding a superior black contender to expose  the fraud by Establishment renegades.

Not surprisingly, this growing presence of aliens in the background of all popular programmes prompted a sour reference to ‘gap niggers’ by an  unemployed film/TV ‘extra ‘ of my acquaintance.

There is therefore an unanswerable case for much tighter censorship of TV (and film) productions, having regard to their enormous social influence.  The intention of such censorship would be to exclude

gratuitous violence, sex and foul language; depict bad behaviour and attitudes as such ; ensure political balance and historical accuracy, and have an elevating influence on public and private behaviour.

But we can expect  all the usual self-serving objections from those abusing their positions in the mass media . Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. The corrupt media people show a similar moral imbecility and irresponsibility in their lowest common denominator productions.   As to their claims of social realism , their ‘mirrors of society' are like the distorting versions seen in amusement arcades. And anyway, since when did we depend on the media  for exposure to social realities ?        

Sooner or later all those corrupted by the warped world-picture of numerous media productions have to come home to the simple moral truisms and authentic versions of the real world.

But it wont happen by persuasion ; only by what may well be painful collisions with reality while engaged in escapist foolishness inspired by the media versions.  The news broadcasts are crowded with examples.   

In conclusion, it bears repeating often that there can be no genuine improvement in the moral tone of society without stringent control of mass media productions. Indeed, it has become a matter of national survival to make the mass media reflect the kind of society we want instead of promoting its own decadence.  Meanwhile we are in no better case than those societies long oppressed by religious or secular regimes imposing their own blinkered orthodoxies . 

So are you still quite sure you’re living in the real world?