Having a Life - Or Just Watching One?

(Prompted by a comment from Steve's sister Julie who is staying at our house this summer, "I've been here a week and I haven't missed the telly!")

It's always amazing when you start to total up the amount of time people spend watching TV. These are precious life hours being frittered away on game shows, 'reality' shows, soaps, watching advertisements and channel surfing trying to find 'something good to watch'.

When I moved from the US to the UK I stopped watching TV, that was seven years ago. As we grow up we get used to watching certain shows at certain times, none of 'my' shows were on over here and I didn't have the history of the shows that were on UK TV, they were too unfamiliar - so I fell out of the habit. Like Julie, I didn't miss it and other things quickly filled the space that TV used to take up - long leisurely dinners, conversations lasting for hours, evenings on the patio, etc. And instead of missing TV, I've become rather anti-TV.

It's amazing how prevalent TV is and what a large impact it has on us. It is in our homes, takes up a huge part of our lives and is largely unquestioned and unchallenged. Very few people question the idea of having a TV in their home, one just is. Livingrooms and lounges are designed around them. The English TV licensing agency gets increasingly snippy and then downright nasty if you don't pay for a TV license because everybody has one and if you don't pay for a license, you must be dodging the fee rather than ligitimately having no television.

And what a huge influence on our lives, consuming our non-work time, influencing our actions and buying decisions (they don't call it 'programming' for nothing!) and it reduces or destroys two pretty important human abilities - the ability to amuse ourselves and the ability to converse.

Don't believe me? Try these two tests.

Test 1: Have you lost your conversational ability? (How long can you go before turning on the TV to fill the conversational void?)

With the person you love best, turn off the TV and see how long it takes before the conversation dies, before there is a dragging silence, when the flow of words, thoughts and ideas you have to share with one another comes to a halt. How much time does it take? This IS the person you are most interested in in the whole world, right? And how long did your conversation last?

Test 2: Do you still have the ability to amuse yourself?

Similar to Test 1, turn off the telly and see how long it takes before you're bored and your fingers start twitching towards the remote. How quickly do you run out of ideas and things to do? You're a smart adult human being, you should be able to amuse yourself indefinitely, right?

So, how long did you go? Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years? Do you still have the ability to converse, do you still have the ability to amuse yourself - or are they both gone? Steve and I just got back from a trip on the motorbike where we talked for 17 days straight, no commercial interruptions - does that sound like fun or does that sentence bring on the nervous tingles of TV withdrawal?

Most people can go for a few hours or a few days, but then having lost those very important abilities turn to the TV to provide what they no longer have themselves.

So they watch and they watch, and as they watch the hours of their lives disappear one by one. Now, I don't know about you, but the only thing I want using up the hours of my life is me, not the telly - and I want to use those hours having my own experiences and adventures, making memories that I can look back on, stories to share with my children and when I'm old, my grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Because when you're 90 with your great grandchild on your knee telling the story of your life, what are you going to say, "I watched a lot of really good TV"?