whitedot.org/issue/iss_story … ug=tvbgone
It’s amazing what happens when you turn the television off. People begin to talk! But maybe that was the point - they didn’t want to have to.
They did a no TV night in an area of Brighton - whitedot.org/issue/iss_story … n_brighton - and people came out into the streets, talked etc. Of course they wouldn’t all bring their sofas out every night if they didn’t have TV but…
TV is just too easy.
The thing I hate about it these days is always being able to find something watchable - without necessarily finding anything really good. Call me conservative, but I think only having 4 channels in the UK when I was a kid was a positively good thing. Quality not quantity. And you could establish within a minute whether there was anything on you wanted to watch, then turn the telly off if there wasn’t. Rather than flipping through 100 channels one by one then starting again at the beginning in the hopes that something had changed.
I’m not a fan of movie channels either. Beginning to sound a bit negative here! As far as I’m concerned they’re not TV. They’re a different medium - movies. Kinda like if the internet had been used to simply publish the text of books or newspapers. I don’t object to movies being shown on TV per se but I feel they’re unhelpful to television as a medium in itself.
I have the Chunghua Telecom internet TV system that gives about 30 channels of Taiwanese TV plus God TV - 'nuff said - although I have seen a couple of good dramas on it by chance, France TV5 - good but my French isn’t good enough though I have seen a couple of French films with English subtitles, Bloomberg and CNBC neither of which are really television - they’re a very boring information feed for money men. Lastly, it has Australia Network (kinda like World Service TV made by the ABC for satellite, cable, hotel bedrooms etc) . It has its fair share of “Aussie Dramas” - All Saints, Stingers, Outrageous Fortune (sorry, NZ) - one step up from Home and Away and Neighbours. Stingers at least, is quite watchable when needed. It also has a number of other dramas, documentaries, travel shows, quizzes and current affairs shows. Has quite a few dramas and documentaries imported from the BBC which are naturally pretty good too.
To me, it’s real, all purpose TV for everyone. Unlike specialised (ghettoized) TV (movie channels, science channels etc), you don’t always know what you’re going to get and consequently what I watch is much broader. I would probably rarely actively seek out programs about art or literature. But if I turn on and find someone talking about something that catches my attention, I learn about something I didn’t know about before.
And if what’s on doesn’t interest me, that’s it, I turn off.
Then I have the infinite variety of the internet to waste my life on. Which has its own pros and cons!