The planet may be baking, but it looks as if what people in the UK are more bothered about is how to bake a decent cake. The Subtitles To Save The World report, an analysis of how frequently particular words were used on British television last year, found that the word “cake” appeared 133,437 times, more than 10 times more than climate change, or indeed all the forms of climate crisis-related terms put together.
It’s the elephant in the room. We’ve been warned we have decades in which to reduce emissions to zero, but still, if television is anything to go by, one of the things we are not talking about is climate change. Banana bread also featured more than wind power and solar energy combined. Pizza was mentioned 84 times more frequently than “climate crisis”.
Well, that’s hardly surprising, is it? We humans think with our bellies.
And talk and watch with them – “food” almost topped the bill of most used words in this analysis of subtitling data from UK broadcasters, appearing 442,363 times. It’s what many of us switch the telly on for.
A 2016 study found that Brits were spending more time consuming food media than actually cooking. In the battle of planet versus belly, it’s not surprising that food gets a bigger slice of the cake.
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And don’t we watch television to escape reality, rather than be confronted by ugly truths?
Clearly that’s an element. Some of us don’t want too many brutal honesties on our small screens. But some news-related words do feature among some of the most commonly used in the report’s analysis.
“Government”, for instance, is mentioned 293,617 times, Covid 251,000 times, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, “lockdown” around 139,100. “God”, for the record, was also a bit of a leader, at 402,393. What’s remarkable is quite how low climate change is. It’s right down there, round about the level of “goldfish” or “Shakespeare”.
Does the report note any other trends in talk about climate change?
Well, it does state that mentions of “individual behaviours such as recycling (63 per cent increase), reusing (70% increase), veganism (16% increase) feature far more prominently than high-impact areas such as renewables (46% decrease), and wind and solar, which were all mentioned under 500 times”. Veganism (food again), in fact, featured almost as often as climate change itself.
What about the weather? That’s almost climate ... television must have mentioned the weather?
Ah yes, now you are right there. Weather was indeed mentioned around 200,515 times, and had doubled in frequency since 2018.
Television might think we don’t want to hear about climate, but we do love to hear a bit of weather.
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