Women are to blame for rubbish TV says Patrick Moore

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I saw that this morning and laughed out loud.
Mad old duffer!

Kinda agree with his Celeb Big Brother remark though.

"I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."

LOL! I can't help but love mad old eccentrics like him though.

all the big telly chefs are men though!!

what a silly old git - but you can't take him seriously though can you?

Dr. Who hasn't gone PC, the assistants have always been "feisty".
On the other hand Star Trek did, quite consciously bring forward a political/social agenda. But that was not a change, the original series upset racists a lot. SciFi has always been more liberal than the society it is written in.

But I think the germ of truth in his statements is not to blame women, but to blame those who make the programmes that target a female audience.
They assume that women want diets, celebrities and fake health advice like homoeopathy.
I'm not aware any mens magazine has ever carried a horoscope, but they do carry science and technology in vastly higher quantity and quality.
Certainly it is reasonable to put much of the collapse in science on the BBC to "broadening the audience". This included hiring presenters whose knowledge of science was so pathetic that they could not even pronounce the terms, much less understand them.

Moore is far from alone in hating the way that science and technology are swamped by "celebrity morris dancing".

I agree with Moore's point about the dumbing down of TV but women are not to blame. It's due to the constant pandering of TV executives to the masses who equate mindless drivel to entertainment. The only reality programme that I can abide is The Apprentice - intelligent numpties who don't mind their lack of integrity, weak business acumen and false sense of teamworking being dissected and impugned by voyageristic, wannabe business moguls like me.

The last three episodes of Horizon have been very good - back on form, especially the one about why the colonisation of the moon is important for accessing a supposedly endless supply of tritium.

DH and I tune in to Patrick Moore and even buy the Sky at Night magazine as well as receive his newsletter. We personally do not watch Dr Poo - puerile, irritating nonsense that is overmarketed and taken far too seriously, imo. Disagree totally with his comments about Star Trek etc - from day one it outraged the likes of the Klu Klux Klan and the episode, Plato's StepChildren, was banned for years because it showed an interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhuru - a no no in 1960s America and UK.

There are some good quality programmes but you have to look for them. On Saturday, the English Heritage Chairman presented a 2 hour programme that compared and contrasted the history of 10 Downing Street, The White House and the Kremlin. That was fascinating.

Roddenberry had to resort to extreme measures to get the black/white kiss on TV at all. Apparently he destroyed all other cuts, and presented the networks with a fait accompli.

But from the racist perspective, the worst character was Uhura, the communications officer.
The actress who played her got to meet Marting Luther King who said that Star Trek was the only programme he liked his kids watching.
Uhura wasn't a black woman...
OK, she was a black woman, but she didn't have a black female role. She was a smart person with a responsible job, who just happened to be a black woman. The normality of her position was the message.

There is an underlying theme in much SF that in a universe containing beings with 12 heads, composed entirely of energy, or are 1 millimetre or 1 mile high, skin pigments don't count for much, and there is a ST episode which pushes that message hard, indeed with rather crass over kill.

Stargate SG1, the longest running SF TV series is a pretty unremitting attack upon superstition and/or organised religion, though their nerve failed when time came to attack the Jesus myths.
It also has a female physicist who kills people with knives and machine guns. She also blew up a star just to make sure the bastards were dead.
Samantha Carter is easily the best female role model in any mainstream modern TV.