There are few spectacles more unpleasant than a television presenter trying to hang on to a job. When one of the presenters of the BBC program Crimewatch resigned recently, rather than suffer the inevitable indignity of being unfinished and replaced by a younger version, he made the usual hurt noises about his masters' overemphasis on youth. People in the media listened sympathetically before he slid from view to join the ranks of television's has-beens.
The presenter's argument, that the views don't care how old you are so long as you can "do the job," unfortunately is not backed up by the evidence. When you're on TV, viewers are always thinking about whether you're losing your hair or your figure and, lately, whether you've had cosmetic work done. This is what they're actually doing when you think they're listening to the wise things you say. Viewers actually don't understand much of what the job involves, they just see you sitting there looking the part. Like the ability to pet one's head while rubbing one's stomach, TV presenting is just one of those sills. Some of those who possess this skill can hit the big name, inevitably as they become more attached to the lifestyle this brings, however, the more likely they are to overstate the skill.
In reality, if somebody is paying you a lot of money to do a job, it's often on the tacit (心照不宣的) understanding that you may be fired suddenly-it's part of the deal. Unlike football managers, TV presenters pretend not to understand this. If they've had many years being paid silly sums to read a script from an autocue (自动题词机)，it's difficult for them to accept that they've been the beneficiary of good fortune rather than anything else; even harder to face the fact that an editor could all too easily send them to the shopping channels.
Something similar eventually awaits all the people who are currently making fortunes that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of presenters. One day we'll decide that their face no longer fits and they'll be dragged away complaining about the same ageist policy from which they no doubt previously profited. Show business is a brutal (残忍的) business. The one thing it reliably punishes is age, particularly among women. That's why, at the age of fifty, female TV presenters become female radio presenters and why girl bands planning to re-form need to get it done before they're forty, after which it will get too hard for everyone to suspend their collective disbelief.
