TV Rant - "What Happens When Consciousness Ends"

Did anyone see that documentary last night, "Life After People", on Channel Four? It has to have been one of the biggest wastes of time, money and concentration ever. The only reason I was watching it was that I'd just done a twenty-five minute run on the back of a toxic weekend and I felt pinned to the bed with a poisoned feeling.
Among other things it was perhaps the zenith of that always astonishing quality known as "stating the bleeding obvious". It was essentially about what would happen to man-made structures and the human legacy on this planet if mankind just, well...disappeared. It was quick to point out from the start that it was not going to be about how we might disappear or why we might - oh, that's handy - it just wanted to focus on the immensely intriguing issue of how the stuff we make will decay without these strangely absent, jumped-up bipeds to maintain it; and, of course, it was all narrated by that familiar, coldly dramatic voiceover artiste whose doomsday declarations crash down like a meta-tsunami of Old Spice all over our cosy bank holiday evenings.
I watched and watched out of sheer amazement - what was I seeing here? Well, without any real flannel, I was seeing obvious C.G.I. of buildings and structures gradually falling into ruin - that's right, not being blasted to dust by atomic explosion or levelled by earthquake or terror-tide, just...slowly...falling...into...disrepair.
"Wooden structures will be the first to go", barks the fat-voiced oracle of all our tomorrows. Luckily he allays my perplexity by informing me that wood can be destroyed by not being varnished by humans and that this fragile flesh of trees can go in two ways: by something called "rotting" and by "woodworm" - apparently worms that eat wood. Well fuck me backwards.
Then he broadsides me with the crashingly unforeseen, "Metal constructions will take longer to decay". I can't believe I'm really seeing this: suddenly I'm looking at a graphic of the Golden Gate Bridge's distinctive orange vermillion slowly and boringly turning grey and brown and becoming sort of mottled and weedy. Then I'm witnessing some rusty cables snapping - apparently it's not good for the cables to snap.
What stunned me also about this programme was the amount of experts they wheeled in, however briefly, to tell you things that even a five-year-old would say "No shit, Sherlock" to. There was some authority on celluloid sitting at a table with four bubbled, blackened and warped bits of film in front of her giving us the damning news that, without this magic called "maintenance", film is vulnerable to the elements and we would lose all our visual history. What, you mean we can't watch "Black Narcissus" or our old Super Eights when we're, er, basking in the toe-tapping boredom of... not existing anymore!? And this of course brings me to my final beef with this ludicrous waste of televisual possibilty, namely, "Who cares what may happen after we all cease to exist?!"
After all, it's not as if it could be something that would impact on our children or great grandchildren. They ruined the point right from the start by stating that this is a vision of what may happen when all humanity has vanished off face of the Earth. I didn't watch it all - I couldn't - but after every single "revelation" I felt so desperate to hear the dark proclaimer intone the other hideously obvious truth that, "luckily no one will be there to give a flippin' toss".
What happens when something occurs that simply can't affect you? Nothing. What happens when no one can consciously perceive something? Nothing. What happens when you don't watch or even hear about a documentary about something that will never affect you anyway?
It would've been more accurate to have shown a black screen, soundlessly, for an hour and a half, as that is closer to what happens when all consciousness ends.