From my previous experience going to school with the children of the owners of our local cable provider (and the local paper as well), I know that the people in charge of my cable are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is a cable system, after all, that thinks that there are enough sports in Toledo for us to have our own 24-hour all-local sports channel. (They actually broadcast some of the gym games from my old private school.) This is a cable system where each of the big three local television networks have their own 24-hour local weather channels, none of which are any good. (I’m hoping that NBC buys up The Weather Channel so we can get a proper Weatherscan channel in here.) It’s not like I have much time to watch television right now — I only watch to keep up on news and the pop culture of the students I teach — but I don’t exactly have that many good options available to me here in Toledo.
Our cable company’s latest brainchild is a 24-hour local real estate listings channel. I’m not particularly sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that this channel bowed right in the middle of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but it doesn’t strike me as a good omen. That being said, the idea of having a real estate channel strikes me on some levels as novel; television offers a lot of ways for real estate agents to market their properties that aren’t available through traditional channels, such as walk-through tours of properties. The thing is, the only actual motion video on the channel, apart from the commercials, are "handy how-tos" segments from the too-perky, too-plastic "host" of the channel. When they actually show a house on the channel, they only show the same static photos you’d find in a listings magazine, or a Website from ten years ago. Some of the photos even look like they were taken using a disposable camera with a lens that someone sneezed over before using it.
The idea of having a television channel without moving images is silly enough, but at least they have audio on there. Unfortunately, in addition to featuring the same kind of low-grade muzak you’d expect on a channel like this, the audio consists of different people reading the fill-in-the-blanks advertising copy the realtors come up with to try to sell the house. That stuff is bad enough to read, but when people are saying it aloud, and the same key bullshit phrases get repeated every fifteen minutes ("cozy" means you’ll feel like a sardine packed in there, "needs TLC" means that the walls are falling apart, etc.), you can literally feel people’s opinions of real estate agents drop. I’d laugh at how poorly put together this channel is if it wasn’t so sad.