{"id":514,"date":"2007-09-22T23:58:41","date_gmt":"2007-09-22T22:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/09\/22\/not-watching-tv\/"},"modified":"2007-09-23T00:12:36","modified_gmt":"2007-09-22T23:12:36","slug":"not-watching-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2007\/09\/22\/not-watching-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Watching TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t really watch much television these days. This week, I watched maybe five hours, an unusually high total, and one consisting solely of live football and rugby matches. Most nights I don’t watch any. When I mention that I don\u2019t watch TV, people tend to be guarded in their response. They probably don\u2019t believe me, and I don\u2019t blame them. After all, everyone<\/em> watches TV, and when people say they don\u2019t, they usually follow up with \u201cwell, except for Questions and Answers, or Oireachtas Report??? proof that they are lying. So I\u2019m usually sceptically asked \u201cwhat do you do<\/em> then????, there being apparently nothing a person can do between the hours of 6pm and midnight but watch Holly & Fearne Go Dating<\/a>, except perhaps to sit in the dark and wait for death to come. So when I respond, as until recently I used to, that I mostly read or listen to music, they assume I\u2019m fibbing. My attempt to construct a picture of myself in a smoking jacket, volume of poetry or philosophy in hand, classical music playing at a discreet volume is laughably unconvincing. I\u2019m watching World’s Greatest Elvis<\/a>, just like everyone else, but I won\u2019t admit it. Or else, I\u2019m not fibbing, and am simply pretentious.<\/p>\n

I can understand people not believing me. It\u2019s the pretentious thing that I don\u2019t get. Why is saying you don\u2019t watch TV seen as somehow showing off? It\u2019s not as if watching TV is something to be ashamed of and it\u2019s not as if reading books is something to boast of either. There are books I\u2019ve read that are of such low quality, and TV shows of such high quality as to make any idea of snobbery absurd. Yes, I like books. But I don’t like them because doing so is somehow supposed to impress people. After all, I also like Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes (indeed there are times when I prefer the Corn Flakes to the books).<\/p>\n

So I didn\u2019t stop watching TV to prove any kind of point, or to lord it over those who still do. I just found myself gradually watching less and less of it. It\u2019s a bit like giving up a drug: after a while, your consumption falls so low that you can\u2019t be bothered any more, but if you\u2019re addicted, you can\u2019t go without for even a moment. Even if there\u2019s nothing on, you\u2019ll surf through the channels over and over again, as if a good program will suddenly appear from nowhere. What you are actually doing with this seemingly hopeless surfing is re-adjusting your expectations. After the third or fourth go-round of the channels, you will decide that Holly & Fearne Go Dating (a program which disappointed me, although I may have misunderstood the title) isn\u2019t all that bad really, and settle in to watch it. You have found the least bad program, and figured it\u2019s still a better option than switching the TV off. A year or two ago, I developed the habit of picking up the TV schedules in a newspaper, and making up my mind at the start of the evening what I wanted to watch. If nothing appealed to me, I would simply not bother switching the TV on at all that evening. Consequently, I was much less likely to find myself watching the least bad programs all night. Without those idle hours of sitting on the couch watching nothing in particular, I soon ended up not knowing much about what was mentioned in the schedules. So these days, unless there\u2019s a film or a match I want to see, my scan of the back page of the paper doesn\u2019t usually throw up anything to interest me. I do still watch TV programs these days, but I do this mostly online<\/a>. I still watch films too, and I do occasionally, on a weekend perhaps, pick up the remote control and see what\u2019s on, so it\u2019s not that I\u2019ve developed an aversion to the moving image. I have simply fallen out of the habit of sitting there, waiting for something good to come on.<\/p>\n

It is not true to say that my time away from the box has liberated me and released the energy that resides within me (experience has told me that no such energy exists). I do not spend my evenings training for a marathon, or learning Japanese. I have not begun doing good works in my community of an evening. TV is now simply one of the various things a person might do after dinner. Having relegated it to this less exalted position, it is strange to think that I used to do nothing<\/em> else of an evening but sit in front of the telly. I recently bought an internet radio, giving me access to more or less every station in the world. I am more excited by listening to it than I\u2019ve ever been by TV. Apart from the fact that there\u2019s more good stuff on radio than there is on TV, you can do other things while you listen to the radio, even if it\u2019s only pairing socks. <\/p>\n

To radio must be added time spent online. By the time I\u2019ve checked email and, where necessary, replied, played a move or two in Facebook Scrabble, read the various feeds I subscribe to, and looked up that thing I made a note during the day to check on Wikipedia (today: Pretoria<\/a>, because one of the South African rugby players is named Pretorius – yes, there is a link), a good two hours might have gone by. During that time I might also have chatted to someone on Skype or Google, and would have been listening to iTunes, a podcast or radio stream in the background. I might then write a post for this blog (this post is being written in wilful oblivion of the Saturday Prime-Time line-ups of the various channels) or comment on someone else\u2019s. I\u2019m aware that all this is no less sedentary than watching television and that there may be a danger of my PC taking the place previously occupied by the TV, but I think it\u2019s a little bit more stimulating in the mental sense at least. And of course there\u2019s still the reading and the music. <\/p>\n

When I was a kid, I\u2019d occasionally meet someone who\u2019d mention that his family had no TV. This was obviously no human child, but spawn of some alien civilisation, as exotic to me as those kids who had a choice of cereals at breakfast (though obviously not the same kids. Families with no TV would never <\/em>have a choice of cereals. They ate only cold raw bran every morning). I just couldn\u2019t imagine getting by without TV, and even though these kids seemed happy enough, I still pitied them. Now I see that I had nothing much to fear from the telly-free life. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d ever go the whole hog and do without a TV in the house, but I\u2019m happy that the one I do have is now a good deal less important to me than my radio, my computer or my books. Now, where did I put that smoking jacket?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t really watch much television these days. This week, I watched maybe five hours, an unusually high total, and one consisting solely of live football and rugby matches. Most nights I don’t watch any. When I mention that I don\u2019t watch TV, people tend to be guarded in their response. They probably don\u2019t believe me, and I don\u2019t blame them. After all, everyone watches TV, and when people say they don\u2019t, they usually follow up with \u201cwell, except for Questions and Answers, or Oireachtas Report??? proof that they are lying. So I\u2019m usually sceptically asked \u201cwhat do you do then????, there being apparently nothing a person can do between the hours of 6pm and midnight but watch Holly & Fearne Go Dating, except perhaps to sit in the dark and wait for death to come. So when I respond, as until recently I used to, that I mostly read or listen to music, they assume I\u2019m fibbing. My attempt to construct a picture of myself in a smoking jacket, volume of poetry or philosophy in hand, classical music playing at a discreet volume is laughably unconvincing. I\u2019m watching World’s Greatest Elvis, just like everyone else, but I won\u2019t admit it. Or else, I\u2019m not fibbing, and am simply pretentious. I can understand people not believing me. It\u2019s the pretentious thing that I don\u2019t get. Why is saying you don\u2019t watch TV seen as somehow showing off? It\u2019s not as if watching TV is something to be ashamed of and it\u2019s not as if reading books is something to boast of either. There are books I\u2019ve read that are of such low quality, and TV shows of such high quality as to make any idea of snobbery absurd. Yes, I like books. But I don’t like them because doing so is somehow supposed to impress people. After all, I also like Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes (indeed there are times when I prefer the Corn Flakes to the books). So I didn\u2019t stop watching TV to prove any kind of point, or to lord it over those who still do. I just found myself gradually watching less and less of it. It\u2019s a bit like giving up a drug: after a while, your consumption falls so low that you can\u2019t be bothered any more, but if you\u2019re addicted, you can\u2019t go without for even a moment. Even if there\u2019s nothing on, […]","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[662],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}