Creativity Quote by Marc Almond

Marc Almond’s line lands like a champagne-pop insult, but it’s really a scalpel aimed at television’s beauty economy. He’s not just complaining about bland programming; he’s calling out an industry rule so entrenched it can hide in plain sight: broadcast “quality” is often just attractiveness with good lighting. By saying “as long as ugly people are not on TV,” he frames exclusion as policy, not accident. The ugliness is structural.

The second clause is the sting. If TV insists on gatekeeping appearance, Almond argues, it owes viewers compensation: bring on people with actual voltage - eccentricity, intelligence, danger, wit, charisma that isn’t just symmetrical. “Only ever” is deliberately absolutist, a provocation that mimics TV’s own blunt sorting mechanisms: hot/not, telegenic/not, bookable/not. He’s mocking the idea that television can demand visual perfection and still serve up safe, interchangeable personalities.

Coming from Almond - a musician whose career has thrived on stylized artifice, camp, and transgression - the quote doubles as a defense of outsider glamour. Pop has long turned “too much” into allure; TV often sands “too much” down into relatability. His subtext is that if you’re going to curate reality, curate it with imagination. Otherwise you’re left with the worst trade: a medium obsessed with surfaces that can’t even deliver someone worth watching.