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Any accident, in or around the home, that's not recorded has become a complete waste of time. We've also discovered that if your clumsy kid is caught in the salivating jaw of the family pit bull, you could be in for big money. But for many of us Australia's Funniest just doesn't do it anymore. We've had to move on to something harder, something a bit later in the evening where the fun never stops: When Animals Attack. What Went Wrong? World's Wildest Police Videos. World's Funniest Natural Disasters. When Cows Explode.

It's good to know the world is currently obsessed with observation. Every day, more and more surveillance cameras are put in place. We delude ourselves that this is for our own protection when we know in our hearts its prime function is for entertainment. These cameras are working tirelessly to bring us the accidents, crimes and great comedy moments of the future.

Every night we're presented with a variety of gruesome choices as our post-prandial entertainment. The spectacle of "reality" wins every time when pitted against Shirl repainting the pine. And Getaway seems too bourgeois when you can witness desperate human beings willing to overcome any obstacle in their bid to get away from the hands of the law. What can compare with that grainy, out-of-focus, shaky-cam video action? We all confront the same questions of taste as we witness another oil tanker exploding, another fire in a New Delhi shopping mall, another bovine bomb imploding - and yet who can tear their eyes away?

It's contemptible but, as a spectator, a voyeur, it's damn engaging. The precarious moral subtext these shows use to justify the material is often more shocking than the footage. The reality is the camera lies. But the cameras used on Reality TV not only lie, they're unfaithful, fickle and a drain on your emotional resources. (This may be the reason Real TV is so popular - it treats you like one of the family.) There will come a time in the not too distant future when we crave something harder. Have you noticed that a few too many people survive these disasters? Where's all the stuff they're keeping from us? Where's the real "real" TV? It hasn't made it to these shores yet but it's out there somewhere circling, waiting for its moment - Death TV.

Death TV makes Australia's Funniest Home Videos seem like the soul of discretion and propriety. The only positive thing about Death TV is, if you play is backwards, you might actually get a happy ending.

On Death TV, people have had their video cameras on, loaded, focused and full of tape when calamity befell them. As tragedy struck, they had the good sense to fire up the Sony. That old videotape of Dad's ill-fated parachute jump doesn't make viewing the home movies much fun, but why should the nauseating image of Dad bouncing on the desert floor like a house brick gather dust when it could be sold and make him a Posthumous star (albeit a falling one)? After all, he would've wanted it that way.

Are we ready for the husband encouraging his wife to video him as he communes with nature? The loyal wife continues to film, her hand frozen in disbelief as he tragically communes with a seven-foot grizzly bear that removes his head with one swipe of its paw.

Surely a headless man riding a bicycle is funny? And surely it's social satire when the newlyweds drive into the back of a cement mixer? And surely it's ironic when the exploding cow's intestines hit the protesting vegetarian in the mouth?

These are the wonders that await us when we take that inevitable step into the abyss of bad taste. As another parachute fails to open, our families will be brought closer together through someone else's sadness. We'll all continue to enjoy Reality TV as long as the reality isn't ours - and that's where we must change our attitude.

It's not good enough to sit at home and watch someone else's reality. It's time to get out there and make our own. I believe we have an obligation to give back a little of what society has given to us. To give back some of the fun, laughter and disaster that have given us so much joy. When that fatal hour arrives, is it too much to ask that a family member is standing by with the camcorder? Isn't it about time we made Death TV a natural part of life?

I had been backpacking with a friend and in my delirium something peculiar occurred. An ineffective, unpolished train mirror caught my reflection, distorting my head to elephant man proportions. It was a disturbing sight, so I began staring at the other less elephantine passengers. Then I became aware of a disturbing pattern - the 18 people sitting in the carriage were each paired off with someone else. This gave the appearance of nine groups of two rather than 18 individuals.

The disconcerting aspect was that everyone looked like the person they were sitting next to. Friends looked like their friends, wives looked like their husbands, and husbands looked like their wives: two businessmen in dog-dropping brown pin-striped suits, two youths decked out in sports logos and matching acne, a husband and wife in camel-coloured trench coats and cowboy boots. I felt I had entered a mobile village of the damned, a subway of similarity, the visual equivalent of the doppelganger effect.

Had I been drinking or was I seeing double? Perhaps they lived in houses without mirrors and took turns being the looking glass. Perhaps they shared a brain. Perhaps the explanation was Darwinian. What I witnessed was merely the need to reproduce without the messy physical process - no stains, blame or shame. I had the frightening thought I was aboard some kind of "style ark". Had God instructed Noah to collect two of every badly designed garment to save them from the coming holocaust? It made sense because the last time I saw outfits this bad they were on the Christian TV ads.

Did each person think their duplicate looked good because they looked exactly like themselves? Or had these people known each other for so long that, like pets, they gradually grew to resemble each other? Or was it something more insidious? Was I in the midst of an impromptu twins convention? Were there nine people with ideas on how they should look, and another nine, the hangers-on, who just ripped them off? Who was the creative force in the choice of wardrobe and who was plagiarist? At the beginning of time there must have been someone whose brain burst with the brilliant concept of teaming ugh boots with stonewashed denim, then this one moment of clarity and individualism was stolen by a generation of thieves.

The one thing I couldn't fathom was the conscious desire to dress like someone else. Without getting into the obvious fetishistic fun of masquerades and dress-ups, wearing the same clothes as a friend or partner seems, pardon my honesty, freaky. Then I recalled once speaking to a matching couple. They were wearing identical outfits: shell suits in pale blue with luminous vindian bands and bright pink piping, white socks, runners and baseball caps.* Their reason for wearing the same clothes was that they could always find each other in a crowd, To them, the embarrassment at having the most grotesque, clown-like costumes as everyday wear was overpowered by this practical concern. What they so resoundingly lacked in taste they made up for in commonsense. As they wandered off into the body of the crowd, instantly being obscured by a flock of football jumpers, I wondered: if I looked like that would I want anyone to find me?

The experience on the train demonstrated that we are perfectly capable of cloning each other without the help of science. It was unsettling and gazing around the compartment I was forced to stifle a giggle. My travelling companion asked me what was so humorous and I didn't have the heart to tell him, especially when I realised that we too looked exactly the same, apart from the hessian sack he was wearing on his head. Twin dark blue backpacks, steel-capped shoes, black jeans, T-shirts and faces flushed red and exhausted from running for the train. The reflection in the warped mirror proved to be fatal. One of us was a duplicate, a carbon copy of the other. The question that puzzles me to this day is - which one?

* I must stress this is a matter of personal taste, I have always believed you should wear what you want (in the privacy of your home). Although I am not enamoured of the shell suit I can understand its appeal in terms of comfort. I would, however, give this advice: be careful near an open flame.

It's our civic duty to maintain the artistic integrity of our cities, the very reason we have art galleries is to keep this sort of stuff off the street. What sort of world are we creating for our children when bad "art" can flourish anywhere? If it's good enough to be inside, it should be inside. It should be protected from the elements and the vandals.

If we must endure street sculptures, can they be made more practical than glorified seating? Could they be shelters for the homeless? By day a lifesize replica of the Trojan horse, by night accommodation for 20.

Our cities have always been the sites of artistic atrocities. Do you remember when green was an offensive colour? When enormous communal areas were paved and cobbled, when trees and shrubs were removed in favour of pile-encouragmg concrete seats?

Grey was the approved tone and drab, lifeless city squares sprang up everywhere, These amazingly sterile and inhuman spaces look magnificent on the drawing board, sparse, architecturally sound to Bauhaus, and so disfunctional that people avoided them like the plague. In those days the streets bristled with life, mostly because people were trying to avoid the abrasive nature of council-approved open spaces.*

The mood changed and colour became important again. Any innocent building fell prey to a bunch of rabid, paint-wielding do-gooders. Murals began to flood the street-art market. You couldn't round a corner without feeling guilty as another two-storey monstrosirty accused you of not caring for the poor or supporting multinationalist or hating ganga or having lost the child within. Why do murals always have to point the finger? What allows a wall of paint to have so much self-righteous indignation? As a medium for social change, they're about as effective as cabaret. Did a painting of a dove on a wall ever stop a tank?**

For 10 years I was forced to walk along unpainted back streets to avoid feeling ashamed, and as a means to scurry away from the murals with my bitterness intact. These days murals have given way to sculptures, probably because you can't paint much on thin air. Empty spaces, much loved for their lack of pretence, are constantly being filled with functional sculptures: shards of pastel glass you can sit on, bronze parodies of business-suited men, mosaic bins bristling with bright summer colours and maggots.

The intention of these structures is to humanise the emptiness and beautify the surrounds. However, to my mind, this "beautifying" is as effective as tinsel and Christmas lights around a toilet seat. If we want to make lasting and exquisite structures, and artistic statements on the streets, then it seems rational that we return to the old ways.

For instance, the clock in the Old Town Square in Prague (opposite the beautiful Tyn Cathedral) was commissioned by the council of its day and yet it's the most serene and wondrously beautiful creation.

It's also one of a kind, because when the work was finished the council dragged the designer aside and struck out his eyes to ensure no other town would build a better timepiece. A similar story exists for the Taj Mahal: artisans had their hands lopped off so they could never again produce such a splendid vision.

To my way of thinking, this is a small price to pay. It would also force the artists involved in fashioning these buildings/sculptures/murals to really think-about the worth of their work. Is this elongated bronze of two turkeys sleeping worth my right hand? Is this charming mosaic of two mauve divers chasing a lime-green starfish worth my eyesight? Is this biornorphic puddle of sepia-toned turn-of-the-century snapshots encased in resin equal to my life?

If the answer is yes, then throw caution into the wind and create.

*The only thing that can live and thrive in these environments is the skateboard. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, these are often the only things banned in such areas.

* I have no record of a dove, living or painted, stopping a tank. However, there is the tale of the church that houses Da Vinci's recently restored The Last Supper. When German bombs fell, every other wall was damaged or destroyed, and yet The Last Supper remained untouched and intact. Proof of God or evidence of mans poor aim? Still, it's a very, very good mural.

It's a dire state of affairs that in the new millennium we will be forced to acknowledge that our grandchildren's fate was decided in a cardboard box. Polling day is an overrated and outdated exercise. A day on which you're forced to mingle with members of opposing political persuasions to assert your democratic rights. Entering a cardboard booth that has just been vacated by a total stranger cannot be healthy for ourselves or our children.

That last voter could have come from anywhere. In light of our lax judicial system, it might even have been a convicted felon. Make no mistake, in this less populous land of the free, many of those other voters are indeed thieves and murderers.

You'd feel safer voting out in the country - knowing half the folks who came to vote and being related to the others. The problem with the city is the large diversity of people sardined into a relatively small area. On the day of the referendum, when we're called out to do our patriotic duty, are we placing ourselves in incredible danger?

Thanks to the thoughtless design of the cardboard voting booths, our hips end up jutting into no man's land, presenting the perfect prize to the petty crim. While you, noble citizen, are obsessed with the dilemma of our future and momentarily dazed by the YES/NO question, filthy fingers may be primed to pilfer your possessions. Cardboard offers little protection for your valuables, or from the vicious thrust of a knife _ not to mention the virulent sneeze of a passing voter. This is the other great, yet oft ignored, danger of communal voting. How many times have you entered a polling booth to be confronted by an unusual smell, an uncomfortable stickiness. a mess of paper or mound of dead skin?

After years of voting, I can say in all honesty that the following day I feel sick. Sick to the stomach and wracked with anguish that I had once again failed to divine the populist sentiment and a pick a political winner. At least that is what I believed until a moderate amount of research revealed the true cause of my sickness - cardboard boxes are breeding grounds for disease. The last great outbreak of salmonella poisoning in Canada came from a bacteria-laden hotdog on polling day. Let us not forget that the typhoid epidemic of 1872 began in a polling booth. We need only look to our northern neighbours to witness the dangers inherent in voting. Is it worthwhile, even for the sake of liberty, to be exposed to tuberculosis, consumption, numerous venereal diseases a possibility of theft or death?

Voting must move with the times. We should cease these feeble attempts to make it a community event and hone in on comfort. Why leave the security of our home to cast a vote? We have the the Internet, phone lines, and the ultimate product of freedom, television. If this century has been about anything, it has been about the struggle for freedom. The humble box has spread the plague of democracy more effectively than any other method. It filled the vacuum left by totalitarian states and communist regimes with a seductive world of wonder. Who could resist its dizzying array of colours, its distorted view of reality and its seemingly endless, yet almost affordable, range of products?

The quality of freedorn is directly related to the number of TV stations one can receive. In Australia we're relatively free compared to some developing nations who are now only fully understanding these. concepts with the help of MTV. Americans, on the other hand, enjoy rubbing excessive cable-loving freedom in our faces. In this original Land of the Free, there's so much high-quality television it's hard, if riot impossible, to leave the home.

It's my belief that contemporary cultures should vote by remote (the technicalities we can leave to the CSIRO), Everyone who is anyone has a remote. The only people who don't are the poor, the homeless and those who have rejected TV as the most culturally significant icon of the late 20th century*. These people, through their own action, (or inaction), should be ineligible to vote anyway.

It's time to accept the future, to embrace a new nation. In short, it's time to vote by remote.

* Tragically, in Australia, some country areas have limited freedom due to the placement of transmitters.