GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD...

I've been mulling this over for some time, since Christmas day to be exact, and the painful conclusion is unavoidable. Planet Earth will shortly be conquered and enslaved by space aliens and it's all the fault of TV angling presenters.
Now, before you have me dragged off for a date with a bearded Austrian psychiatrist, some rubber gloves and mains power supply, you had better make sure that you first deal with the bunch of raging insomniacs and nutters who ensure that the some truly dreadful angling programmes stay on the air by avidly watching them through bloodshot eyes at all hours of the day and night.
I know it’s now April but it’s taken this long for me to calm down enough to write about it without hitting the keys in such a rage that I’d be down to the bone by the end of the first sentence. Honestly, if I had the time I would visit each and every viewer, gaffer tape them in to a chair and beat them to within and inch of their lives with a rolled up copy of The Derbyshire Times... with a nail in the end. Mind you I suspect they would probably all be out Carp fishing when I called. Let’s face it, they are the only group of anglers with enough participants and an average IQ lower than punched bread who would be capable of influencing the viewing figures. Plus they are also the people most likely to stay up late watching dreadful TV shows. Mainly because they can’t get a girlfriend and cant sleep without a bed-chair and the sound of a rat burrowing into nearby bait bucket.
This topic has only arisen as I finally succeeded, after years of trying, in persuading my domestic goddess that we can't live without Sky Television. Christmas day it was switched on and the Charlton-Kemp clan were in a state of high excitement. Obviously I wasn't allowed any sports channels, Oh no. the personal price I would have to pay to get those would be way too high and would almost certainly involve some form of painful self flagellation. No, I didn't need to go through too much pain as I had an ace up my sleeve. After negotiations worthy of Kofi Annan ("Just think darling, all those lovely National Geographic programmes on Guinea Pig herders in Lima".) I settled for the basic family package and sat quietly salivating like a Pavarotti in a pie shop at the prospect of immersing myself in the angling fest that exists on the multitude of small channels, that I had forgotten to mention.
Over the following days I dived headfirst into the endless stream of Angling TV at every opportunity and I have to say that on the whole its almost a total and utter pile of poop. I'm sure this revelation has probably caused a mass fainting of Rupert Murdoch's flunkies but really, come on, some of the presenters could be outwitted by a cleverly shaved monkey and out-fished by my three year old son. (he is devastating with 3 metre whip and small Rudd at my local fishery)
Of course there are some obvious exceptions to the torrent of bilge. 'A Passion For Angling' is sublime, managing to portray the beauty, magic and majesty of English coarse fishing, as well as showing the true joy of having a proper like minded fishing buddy. Similarly, the dentally challenged Matt Hayes manages to consistently deliver the goods with some outstanding fish captures and some much more imaginative concepts for angling series. There are some other good programmes, John Wilson leaps to mind, but, it has to be said that the overwhelming majority of the rest appear to be a bunch of whooping Americans and unskilled-stiff-upper-lipped-wooden British chaps who can neither fish nor present.
I know a little of how TV works, having been (un)fortunate enough down the years to take part in several angling programmes and TV production is all smoke and mirrors and more slippery than a Euro MP’s expenses claim. With the right edit they really can convince you that bears don’t pooh in the woods preferring instead to use a petrol station toilet on the A46.
I once fished all day for TV in a group of five plus a self important presenter. At the end we were all ordered to tip our fish in one net, where upon the presenter kneeled over it in front of the camera and passed it all off as his own. In the final cut we were not even shown or mentioned. Just lots of shots of the main star with his rod bent followed by close ups of his smug grin and our combined bulging net.
And there is more......Another thing TV does if the main presenter isn’t awake/sober/intelligent enough to catch enough fish to make decent TV is pad out the programme with ‘cultural interest pieces’. Think about it, how many times does your average TV presenter put down his fishing rod and go and spend half the programme meeting old men that have spent 50 years rebuilding a pointless steam engine to run their toothbrush? Or old ladies that make jam from tree bark and knit their own underwear from straw? Why do they do that on what is supposed to be a Angling programme?
Its simply because that even with a full days fishing edited down to 30 minutes they still can’t catch enough to fill the advert break. Think about your last fishing trip, if you filmed it and cut it down, did you catch enough to fill 30 minutes? I’d have a fair stab that most of us did.
They don’t do this in any other sports coverage. For example, when a British F1 driver is, as usual, running sixth in the race with no further improvement likely, they don’t drag them off the track to interview a mechanic who is nursing a hedgehog back to health that had a quill broken after being clipped by a Ferrari in the pit lane. No, what they do is let us watch them drive pointlessly round and ultimately fail. In TV La-La land we never see presenters hook themselves in the finger, fall in, get stung, birds nest their reels, catch nothing and ultimately crash and burn. What they do to hide their embarrassment and ineptitude is pretend that Ma Boggins Carbon Neutral Goat Farm is more interesting than the fishing, when the truth is that the director has ordered them to do the interview because he is panicking his man ovals will be nailed to the editing studio’s door by his boss for only having enough angling action to fill the pre programme trailer.
And let’s not forget, TV gets access to all the best waters in the country. Places where you and I would only get a day ticket if we offered up our first born for sacrifice. And whilst on these fish stuffed waters presenters will usually be backed by red hot advice and secret baits from the fishery owner who would crawl over shattered pole sections naked if it meant his water looked good on the telly. After all, think of what they could charge for a day’s fishing if a hapless TV type managed to drag out a record fish right in front of the camera?
The key for me is in the title of most of the programmes ‘Angling’ and what I want from an angling presenter is a proven ability to catch lots of fish and the ability to teach me a thing or two. And that’s why it is a tragedy that we gobble up the bilge given too us and don't insist that people like Bob Nudd et al get given a shot at a series. Imagine how much you could have learnt from programmes presented by Ivan Marks? Whilst your average presenter struggles to catch fish out of an aquarium you could have left Ivan alone in your bathroom for half an hour and he would have had a roach out of your toilet.
Whilst I was gnawing my fingernails to destruction thinking about this topic something else occurred to me. Something far worse than having to suffer the torment of watching this stuff.

Consider this.
In all the time since TV began, the signal has been wandering unstoppably through space and sooner or later it will be stumble across some form of intelligent life. When it does, I'm sure that even the most sophisticated ET would recognise and relate to the noble art that is fishing and why we humans enjoy it so. They may even make purring noises (or something) at the beauty of our English countryside. But I can't help wondering what they would make of our average TV angling presenter and if they have a phrase equivalent to "bumbling yokel".
More worryingly, bombarded by the signals from our several hundred channels they might decide they like the look of our green and mostly pleasant Earth (excluding Birmingham obviously) and decide they would like a piece of the action.
They may be slightly put off by how capable of violence we would appear to be from our TV shows. They may also be slightly disturbed by the skeletal, shrill, cockney harridans that haunt the evening soap operas. But any bogey man capable of receiving and de-coding the signal would clearly be sophisticated enough to realise it’s all made up.
However, once they took away all the made up rubbish they would be left with programmes that show real humans at work and at play. Then they would see our motley bunch of mercurial presenters chuckling their way through another blank. In fact, due to the wonders of TV and it’s never ending race through the cosmos, this motley bunch are in many senses advanced ambassador for our planet. After all, it’s far more likely an alien race will discover us through our stellar transmissions than it is by them, as numerous poor quality programmes would have us believe, randomly landing in a Southern American back garden and sticking a probe up someone’s bottom.
And that’s the problem, and also why we are all shortly to become alien play things. I have absolutely no doubt that Mr and Mrs ET will take one look at this mob and, once they have stopped laughing, decide without hesitation that they could conquer Earth armed with spoons.