Television

Eee TV is great. Which other medium can make you laugh, cry, can educate you, tell you a story, move you, and shape your opinions of the world? Quite a few I suppose; books, radio, newspapers, music.... OK, that was a bad line of argument. But all of these require vast acres of effort. As you might remember from my blog about the theatre, the arts haven’t always been kind to me. But TV on the other hand, requires you to simply suspend some disbeliefs (quite easy) and let it wash over you. The internet comes quite close, but you still have to work quite hard to actively filter out all the crap, such as when your friends keep on forcing you to watch ‘hilarious’ videos on You Tube. They are never funny.

And England does indeed seem to have some of the best TV in the world too. I am not being patriotic here; just go to France or Austria or Germany or Spain or Australia or Luxemburg or just about anywhere else for that matter, to really appreciate it. They just seem to have about seven channels, called stuff like TFR SIX, with one five hour long show every evening, which is invariably hosted by an idiot in an orange suit, with parlour games, singing, dancing, shouting and a whole variety of crap. There will sometimes be dancing girls, with the highlight of the entire being the size of bikini allowed at primetime. This theme is then taken to the next level, with a plethora of soft core porn after 11. That was quite fun on school trips, but these days it just seems a bit depressing that so much of the world lives this way.

And TV really has changed the world. My aunt didn’t see any TV until she was 20, so she consequently didn’t understand a word the American customers said at Butlins said when she worked there. I read an article once (which I can’t find for the life of me) which described crime increasing several fold in after television was introduced in an Indian state (please tell me if you know about this). We read books about TV and base the plan of our living rooms around it. Where exactly would our sofa point otherwise?

TV might look like the lowest rent medium there is. The media equivalent of a house plant or fish tank instead of a dog or war zone. But once you realise you are dragging your sofa ever closer to it and ordering up a fresh batch of narcotics (now with a wheel of health), you might realise you should restore your disbeliefs. At least during the adverts.