Fifty years ago, in another age of television, Ephraim Kishon wrote a sketch in which he described the fame he gained when he appeared, for a few seconds, on the television screen.
Kishon, who did one or two things in the Israeli cultural public long before the television box became a basic consumer product, was amazed at its ability to make a person famous only by virtue of its appearance in it.
It was a wonder to him how in any other field a man needed considerable action to buy a name for himself, but the power of the television show has the power to redeem him from his constant anonymity and turn him, in the blink of an eye, into an anonymous caterpillar into a beautiful-winged butterfly.
The mysterious alchemy of television was well described, years later, also by "Seinfeld", who recently returned to our lives courtesy of Netflix. As you may recall, the hottest comedy of the 90s boasted of being a "series on nothing." The principled insistence of its creators to give a place of honor to the trifles that make up our lives was then perceived as subversive. In its fourth season, its protagonists Jerry and George winked at viewers, wondering if their trivial lives could be used as raw material for a TV series. When they came to offer their wares to a large television network, the manager wondered: "Why would anyone want to watch this ?!" "Because it's going to be televised," George said, not entirely wrong. The joke made us laugh then. We did not assume that in the end she would be at our expense.
It was to be expected that in our present age, in which self-documentation has become a major occupation and computer and mobile screens have become popular media arenas, the television presence will lose its magic power. A review of what is happening on the home screen will make it clear that the news of his death was certainly premature. The network only serves as a hallway to the TV lounge, and everyone is pushed to the screen in a desperate attempt to extend the promised 15 minutes of citrus. Along the length and breadth of the broadcast schedule are embedded programs that serve as a production line of heroes for a moment. If television was once used as a means to present a valuable and meaningful act, today the show itself is the main enterprise.
Rolling on ventures like "The Singer in a Mask" or "Stories from the Armchair", which provide celebrities with another opportunity to vent their meager weight in front of a camera, is easy, too easy. It is much more interesting to examine the process by which politicians also embraced television, turning it into a reality-shaping tool. Members of the current government are not the first to use the television screen as a means to burn in the viewers' consciousness one government achievement or another, since since the birth of the modern media, a historical event not recorded on camera resembles a tree falling in the forest unheard.
Nevertheless, it seems that lately there is no longer a need for the event itself.
Without the ability to point to a single real achievement, activists run from studio to studio, demanding our attention and assuming that their very appearance in it will give them volume and reality.
The new editions have become the reality shows of the politicians, struggling with them for their survival in the winning political kitchen.
It is no coincidence that during his visit to Russia, the Prime Minister ignored the presence of President Putin, and became much more interested in her presence in the place of the Israeli media.
He, too, like the rest of us, just desperately wants to be on TV.
