Test 002 - READING - VSTEP

TV REVIEW
Lucy Chang tells you what’s new (and not so new!) on your screens this summer.
I always look forward to this time of year, and I’m always disappointed! It’s the time of year when the TV channels tell us their plans for the summer and every year I tell myself that it might be different. It never is. Take SuperTV, for example. This channel, on our screens for five years now, broadcasts a depressing mix of game shows and music videos. So what do we find in the new schedule? I’m The One, a game show with holidays as prizes, and VJ-TV, yet another music video programme with brainless presenters. They’re also planning to repeat the dreadful chat show Star Quality, which is about as entertaining as watching grass grow. Why can’t they come up with new ideas?
Channel 9 does a little better. Now that Train Driver has finished, they’ve decided to replace it with Staff Room, a reality show that follows teachers around all day. It should be the hit of the summer, giving us an idea of what really goes on when the lesson is over. Who doesn’t want to see and hear what teachers say about their students at the end of the school day? Great stuff! Together with Life in Aylesford Street, the soap opera that everyone’s talking about, it looks like Channel 9 could be the channel to watch this summer.
Over on BTV1, Max Read is back with Joke-a-Cola, the comedy show. The first series was slightly amusing, the second hilarious. Let’s wait and see what the third series is like. Comedy is difficult to get right, but it ought to be great. I wish I could say the same about the sitcom, Oh! Those Kids! It’s enough to look at the expressions on the faces of the cast! It’s obvious they know it’s rubbish and the script is just so badly written! Oh! Those writers!
The programme makers must think we’ll watch anything. That’s just not true. People might have hundreds of channels on their TV or might live near a cinema with a dozen screens. There is so much choice of entertainment these days - TV, the cinema, the theatre, even the internet that they have to work hard to keep their audience. What they should be doing is making new, exciting programmes. Where are the programmes that make people think they must stay in to watch them?
We have to ask ourselves what entertainment is. We have to think about what people do with their leisure time. Television has been popular for about 50-60 years but it might not be popular forever. More people are going to the cinema and theatre than ever before. More people are surfing the internet or playing computer games than ever before. If Oh! Those Kids! is all that the TV can offer, why should we watch it? With one or two exceptions, this summer’s programmes will make more people turn off than turn on.

The reluctant hero
The most endearing thing about Aaron Green - and there are many - is his refusal to accept how famous he’s about to become. ‘I can walk down the street and not be hassled, which is really nice. I kind of hope that continues and I’m sure it will,’ he says earnestly. He seems genuinely to believe that the job won’t change his life. ‘There's nothing fascinating about my life, and there’s absolutely no reason why that should start happening.’ You can only wish him well.
How lovely if this turned out to be true, but the chances are it won’t, and he must know this. Aaron has been cast as the hero in the latest fantasy blockbuster that will hit our screens next year. The first photo of him in his costume was released last week to Internet frenzy.
After an award nomination for his last film, Aaron is having the biggest year of his life, but it hasn’t gone to his head. ‘It’s nice if your work is praised, but it’s all very new to me, this,’ he says. ‘I really like working in this profession and exploring its possibilities. Who knows what the future holds? We could dream about what might happen next, but there’s not much point. I’m just enjoying my job and want to do well in it in the future, but that’s kind of it, really. No big hassles.’
Of all the characters in his last film, which is based on a true story about a group of university students who start an influential blog, Aaron’s character is the one who emerges as most likeable. But he insists that the plot is not as straightforward as it might appear. ‘What’s wonderful about this film is that everyone feels they are the good guy. I don’t think anyone in the cast felt they were playing the villain. It was just a group of human beings that had different opinions.’
It’s a typically thoughtful answer from the 27-year-old, who seems to be a bit of a worrier and prefers to avoid watching himself on screen. Doubtless he doesn’t care for interviews either, but he is so open and engaging that you wouldn’t know it. He felt ‘a heightened sense of responsibility’ playing a real-life person in his last film, but had no contact with the person concerned. ‘These people are living and breathing somewhere - of course that has a great effect on the care with which you approach your work. I kept wondering if he’d come and see the film, if he’d recognize himself in my performance or be angered by it.’
His performance has a vulnerability about it that is almost painful to watch. Does he seek out those parts or do directors see that quality in him? ‘I don’t know, I think it’s probably a bit of both. I certainly have that unwillingness to lose naivety; to lose that childlike way of looking at the world. I find it a very real and profound theme in my life and, talking to other people my age, I think it’s universal.’

ADVERTISING – ART OR POLLUTION?
How many adverts do you think you’ll see today? 10? 30? According to the market research firm Yankelovich, some of us see as many as 2,000-5,000 adverts a day! There are adverts all around us. Most of the time we’re not even consciously aware of them. But think about your town or city. How many billboards, shop signs and posters does it have?
Tokyo, in Japan, takes urban advertising to the extreme. Although the city temples may still lay claim to being more impressive, the explosion of sound and colour in the commercial centre can take your breath away. Whether you find the overall effect stunning or nightmarish is a question of personal taste. However, it would be hard not to admire the advertisers’ ingenuity. Recent innovations include interactive games projected onto walls for people to play. ‘Smellvertising’ is also catching on - that’s the idea of using pleasant smells like chocolate to attract consumers’ attention!
Innovations in Tokyo are of huge significance in the world of advertising because where Tokyo leads, other cities soon follow. Big cities from New York to London already have outdoor television screens. Although Tokyo is far from being universally admired, many urban authorities find its approach to advertising exciting and dynamic. So what’s the problem?
If every city copied Tokyo, it would be absolutely terrible!’ exclaims Roberta Calvino of the advertising watchdog group, Ad Alert. ‘At the moment, Tokyo’s futuristic style sets it apart. It invites our attention because there’s simply nothing like it. But we don’t need 100 poor imitations. In many cities, advertising is as bad as litter or vandalism - it spoils our environment. Go beyond the city outskirts and you’ll find that advertising is taking over the countryside, too. The world’s biggest advert was actually in a field in Austria, below the flight path to Vienna airport. It was the size of 50 football pitches!’
According to Roberta, advertising can also influence the way we think and feel. ‘Advertisers want to convince us that their products will make us happy or successful. Unfortunately, that’s all an illusion - you can’t simply “buy” a celebrity lifestyle at the shops! Nevertheless, advertisers work hard to get us to swallow this message. For instance, fashion brands prefer to advertise using images of glamorously made-up supermodels because they want “ordinary” girls to feel inadequate in comparison as the more dissatisfied we feel with our lives, the more we’ll spend to cheer ourselves up! Although outdoor advertising may seem to make less of an immediate impression than TV commercials, its message can have greater force.
In 2007, one Brazilian city made a radical protest. Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, ordered the removal of more than 15,000 adverts! In justification, he condemned urban advertising in very strong terms as ‘visual pollution’. Unsurprisingly, this made many local businesses unhappy. One marketing executive argued that adverts ‘are more like works of art, hiding grey office blocks and industrial estates,’ However, a more typical response can be summed up in this statement from Isuara dos Santos, 19. ‘If we’d known what a difference it would make, we’d have got rid of the adverts years ago. Now we can see the real Sào Paulo, and it’s wonderful!’

Until fairly recently explaining the presence of human beings in Australia was not such a problem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was thought that Aborigines had been on the continent for no more than 400 years. As recently as the 1960s, the time-frame was estimated to be perhaps 8,000 years. Then in 1969 a geologist from the Australian National University in Canberra was poking around on the shores of a long-dried lake bed called Mungo in a dry and lonely comer of New South Wales when something caught his eye. It was the skeleton of a woman sticking out slightly from a sandbank. The bones were collected and sent off for carbon dating. When the report came back, it showed that the woman had died 23,000 years ago. Since then, other finds have pushed the date back further. Today the evidence points to an arrival date of at least 45,000 years ago but probably more like 60,000. (A)
The first occupants of Australia could not have walked there because at no point in human times has Australia not been an island. They could not have arisen independently because Australia has no apelike creatures from which humans could have descended. The first arrivals could only have come by sea, presumably from Timor or the Indonesian archipelago, and here is where the problems arise. (B)
In order to put Homo sapiens in Australia you must accept that at a point in time so remote that it precedes the known rise of behaviourally modem humans, there lived in southern Asia a people so advanced that they were fishing inshore waters from boats of some sort. Never mind that the archaeological record shows no one else on earth doing this for another 30,000 years.
Next we have to explain what led them to cross at least sixty miles of open sea to reach a land they could hardly have known was there. The scenario that is usually described is of a simple fishing craft - probably little more than a floating platform - accidentally earned out to sea probably in one of the sudden storms that are characteristic of this area. This craft then drifted helplessly for some days before washing up on a beach in northern Australia. So far, so good. (C
The question that naturally arises - but is seldom asked - is how you get a new population out of this. If it's a lone fisherman who is carried off to Australia, then clearly he must find his way back to his homeland to report his discovery and persuade enough people to come with him to start a colony. This suggests, of course, the possession of considerable sailing skills.
By any measure this is a staggeringly momentous achievement. And how much notice is paid to it? Well, ask yourself when was the last time you read anything about it. When was the last time in any context concerning human movements and the rise of civilizations that you saw even a passing mention of the role of Aborigines? They are the planet's invisible people. A big part of the problem is that for most of us it is nearly imposible to grasp what an extraordinary span of time we are considering here. Assume for the sake of argument that the Aborigines arrived 60.000 years ago (that is the figure used by Roger Lewin of Harvard in Principles of Evolution, a standard text). On that scale, the total period of European occupation of Australia represents about 0.3 per cent of the total. (D)