Not Watching TV

I don’t 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’t watch TV, people tend to be guarded in their response. They probably don’t believe me, and I don’t blame them. After all, everyone watches TV, and when people say they don’t, they usually follow up with “well, except for Questions and Answers, or Oireachtas Report??? proof that they are lying. So I’m usually sceptically asked “what 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’m 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’m watching World’s Greatest Elvis, just like everyone else, but I won’t admit it. Or else, I’m not fibbing, and am simply pretentious.

I can understand people not believing me. It’s the pretentious thing that I don’t get. Why is saying you don’t watch TV seen as somehow showing off? It’s not as if watching TV is something to be ashamed of and it’s not as if reading books is something to boast of either. There are books I’ve 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’t 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’s a bit like giving up a drug: after a while, your consumption falls so low that you can’t be bothered any more, but if you’re addicted, you can’t go without for even a moment. Even if there’s nothing on, you’ll 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’t all that bad really, and settle in to watch it. You have found the least bad program, and figured it’s 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’s a film or a match I want to see, my scan of the back page of the paper doesn’t usually throw up anything to interest me. I do still watch TV programs these days, but I do this mostly online. I still watch films too, and I do occasionally, on a weekend perhaps, pick up the remote control and see what’s on, so it’s not that I’ve 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.

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 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’ve ever been by TV. Apart from the fact that there’s more good stuff on radio than there is on TV, you can do other things while you listen to the radio, even if it’s only pairing socks.

To radio must be added time spent online. By the time I’ve 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, 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’s. I’m 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’s a little bit more stimulating in the mental sense at least. And of course there’s still the reading and the music.

When I was a kid, I’d occasionally meet someone who’d 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 have a choice of cereals. They ate only cold raw bran every morning). I just couldn’t 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’t think I’d ever go the whole hog and do without a TV in the house, but I’m 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?