Okay this concept may pass some of you by completely, and (if so) I hope you're never in a position to understand it.
I was sitting around with a good friend of mine one day (we were both feeling unusually depressed and anxious and so forth) and we got to talking about how modern media is all about situations of high emotion. When your mental apparatus is normally calibrated, this is all well and good. The baddies nearly kill the hero, all the news stories involve current or imminent disasters, love affairs invariably involve some inspired level of complication (just get up there and uncross those stars already!). All is interesting, titilating, moving, whatever.
But not so much when you're anxious (and depressed). In this case telly tends to start occuring like an overgrown teenager with uberangst. Right there, in your own head! Which is anoying (or further depressing) cause what you'd love to do is settle down in front of the telly and have a quiet night in. And you can't, because uberangsty telly is busy making a right mess of the internal furniture. :P So you end up reading Georgette Heyer instead, or wandering around wondering why your life is so disfunctional.
As a beleagured minority, we figured it was unfair to be ignored by the mainstream media, and we wanted an alternative. Then inspiration struck, and we invented "Mello Media". This would be a telly station where the stories told were quiet happy stories about nice things happening. I don't mean Lassie, or similar (way too traumatic). I don't even mean uplifting stories about wonderful things. I mean stories about people who finish up their day at work, catch a bus that turns up on time (which they were not late for), go home, change into really comfortable yet not frumpy clothes and eat really yummy food (that is pleasingly nutritious). Something like soup. And then they sit down with the pet of their choice (who is reassuringly healthy and seems to have had a good day), and then they do something nice like listen to quiet music and perhaps meditate (successfully). A sort of anti Sex In the City.
The news would involve carefully thought out stories about people who had had satisfying successes (perhaps things like they worked on a project that was unstressful and came in on time and within budget). There would be programmes about things that might be helpful (like meditation or undemanding, nutritious and yummy recipies). There would be soaps that followed a collection of friends through their largely uneventful lives where they were pretty much satisfied with things.
On account of being substantially better than I was (yay!), the idea is less gripping than it was at the time. But I do remember it made us laugh (which was reasonably impressive at the time) and started us thinking about how being depressed and anxious could be made less depressing.
I still want the funding.
.carla
Posted by carla at June 25, 2003 03:22 PM