Regular bleaders know I suffer from P.A.N.T.S – see
blog 53 - but after this half term I realise I also have TITs - Television Induced
Tension Syndrome. It’s no laughing matter – it’s debilitating, scary and
left me at one point feeling panic stricken and hopeless.
I often find myself mesmerised by the thing when I
am in a house where TV rules, but this half term, at mum’s, I submerged myself
in an ocean of TV over a 48 hour period and came up for air feeling vaguely
brain damaged.
The root if the syndrome is – my own fault – a
decade and a half without TV so that now when I am in the presence of the beast
I have no defenses. I have lost my tolerance, my immunity. I have friends who
manage to filter out the 89% rubbish and find their way to the rest – but they
are skilled beyond my abilities.
And TV has changed radically in the last 15 years. Any
chance of regaining resilience is thin. Where the prisoners at
Abu Graib were reduced to pitiable, babbling wrecks with water-boarding, sleep
deprivation and threats of death – the same results could be achieved with me in
a locked room with a large TV showing – for example – only soap operas.
What has happened to soap operas? I recall watching
Coronation Street with my folks back in the day – and the most exciting incident
would be Ena Sharples changing her hair net. Now they’re packed with implausible,
fantastical melodrama, underpinned by mind-numbing tedium and dull stupidity.
That’s quite a balancing act.
Films are unwatchable unless you enjoy 3 minute
interruptions every 5 minutes to view gormless women smiling at their cleaning
products or gasping and groaning about their hair conditioner. Are they
experiencing some sort of far-away ecstasy or do they have haemorrhoids?
I watched the iconic Come Dine with Me and thought
that, for light entertainment, in the reality genre, I could cope with that. But
then you watch two or three or four and the screen begins to swim before your
eyes as the same people types in slightly different hair/make-up/clothes – all
slightly delusional – slightly socially inadequate are paraded in front of
camera to make fools of themselves. Do cameramen have to take special drugs?
Anything on Kid’s TV seems to be psychedelic and
hyperactive and with plots that are un-childlike.
I clicked around until I found an infamous piece
called Geordie Shore. I viewed 10 minutes of something so gross – so at-the-dog’s-arse-end
of what humanity reveals of itself - as to be actually depressing.
And yet – when people find out I don’t have TV and
haven’t for around 15 years – (and am not one of those people who substituted
watching on-line for watching ‘the box’) they behave like I am the one who has
a screw loose.
“What do you do”
tends to be the main reaction. Like I must be frantically trying to fill the 16
hours a day that cannot be officially designated to bed-time.
Followed closely by “What do you talk
about?”
I realise that in a society where there are magazines
dedicated to the ridiculous on-screen lives
of the soap-opera characters I may be a wee bit out of step. Every has-been
comic now has his own chat show and/or game show slot, every ‘news’ presenter
is a personality, the private lives of the cardboard cut-out breakfast show casts
have become hot topics, food is entertainment not nourishment and the more
ghastly bits of your personal life you expose or the more private the flesh - the
more likely you are to be ‘trending’ in any 24 hours of the nation’s attention
span.
What do I talk about?
Not bake-offs, not Davina’s waistline, not who is
the most debased character in Geordie Shore...
Hmmm – what’s left?
*
Check out the BGOTR 2-minute Soap Opera
As you can see – I didn’t waste
half term!!!!