Television

I’m a big fan of television; the invention. I think TV is amazing. Think of all the mind-blowing things you’ve seen on TV that you would never see in real life. The birth of baby pandas, the Earth from orbit, the fall of the Berlin wall… TV is a medium that has enormous power and has shaped our lives far more than anyone would like to admit. Those who read the Daily Mail would have you believe that TV is mostly sex and violence, and interestingly, it has been shown that since advent of TV into the domestic home, the crime rate has gone up and the amount of sex indulged in has gone up too. Philosophically speaking, I’m a constructivist and TV has only gone to reaffirm my belief in this idea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory)). The good old goggle-box has been a first class tool in modifying people’s behaviour, but I don’t believe it has necessarily been for the worse (although I couldn’t argue it was entirely positive either).

Growing up, we had three TV channels until 1984 when ‘Channel four’ turned up. There will be many who are nostalgic about this state of affairs, but not I. I was only a young fellow and anything I thought was worth watching was on from about four in the afternoon onwards. In the mid to late eighties Sky TV turned up but my father had no interest in this so we stuck to the four terrestrial channels.  Adults of my generation have a shared cultural TV heritage that has its foundations in the fact that there was nothing else on the other two/ three channels.

As a kid, it felt like winter was nine months long and what could a boy do of a long cold, dark, wet evening do other watch the TV. There are lots of shows that I watched as a kid that I believed were good, and I’m sure I liked them till I watched them as an adult. Some years ago I bought the ‘A-team’ on DVD and re-watched it; hilarious, fantastic fun and most entertaining. They even threw in a free episode of ‘Knight Rider’. I never knew what a lame show ‘Knight Rider’ was till I watched it as an adult. And if that wasn’t enough, I later watched an episode of ‘Air Wolf’. I can’t believe how weak that entire show was. Forty minutes of filler followed by five minutes of recycled footage of the helicopter. But regardless of my adult preferences, at the time I was suitably entertained.

I stopped watching TV properly around the mid-nineties. Between then and now there has been the odd hour or two here and there, but I’ve never watched TV the way I used or anything close. This began when I left for university in the early/ mid nineties; the campus enforced a strict TV licence policy and at the time I was far more interested in music so the TV fell by the wayside. When the mid/ late nineties arrived I was out of the habit and the grisly spectre of ‘reality TV’ had arrived. I’m not going to be one of those frightful bores who bemoan reality TV, but it isn’t to my taste, so there was little incentive to turn the TV on. Since then I’ve never really picked the habit back up. I would be lying if I said I didn’t watch some TV. My partner watches the box and from time to time (as we share a house), our orbits collide and so I catch bits of shows.

For me TV has fallen by the wayside and has been replaced by the computer. I’m far more interested in surfing the web, messing around with bits of software and other IT chicanery. It has gotten to the state that I frequently find TV is an insufficiently interactive media form me and I get bored. If TV (whether rightly or wrongly), has made a generation of kids suffer with ADHD, then one can only wonder what impact computers will have on the next generation.