{"id":341,"date":"2003-02-21T01:25:00","date_gmt":"2003-02-21T05:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=341"},"modified":"2007-03-17T16:42:59","modified_gmt":"2007-03-17T20:42:59","slug":"blackmail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=341","title":{"rendered":"Blackmail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reality TV these days lacks imagination. <span class=\"booktitle\">Joe Millionaire<\/span>? <span class=\"booktitle\">Married by America<\/span>? How about the old Monty Python skit, <span class=\"booktitle\">Blackmail<\/span>? The <span class=\"booktitle\">Blackmail<\/span> set consists of the host at a desk with a telephone. A crude home video rolls, with a running meter and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen. The video begins innocuously. A car drives down a street, an unidentifiable man walks into a house. Shadows appear in a bedroom window as the meter continues to run. The man and a woman begin to undress. The woman brandishes a whip. The camera zooms in&#8230;and the phone rings. It&#8217;s the poor sap calling, agreeing to pay whatever&#8217;s on the meter to stop the video. <\/p>\n<p>Think about it. Zero production costs. Staff salaries partly defrayed by the swag. And who could afford not to watch?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reality TV these days lacks imagination. Joe Millionaire? Married by America? How about the old Monty Python skit, Blackmail? The Blackmail set consists of the host at a desk with a telephone. A crude home video rolls, with a running meter and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen. The video begins innocuously. <a href='https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=341' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}