I can’t remember when I was first aware of the concept that watching too much television was bad for you. It may have been extremely early because I can remember when the only TV I was allowed to watch was ‘Vision On’. I’m not sure how accurate that memory is of course, since I also seem to be able to recall earlier programmes than that. It’s probably more correct to say that the idea has always been with me, presumably introduced by my mother.
It used to be fashionable to make this claim but it’s now fallen out of the limelight somewhat. It isn’t that there’s no tendency who still believe it’s bad for you so much as that TV is no longer at the cutting edge of technology and we are now focussing our concerns on things like echo chambers and public shaming on social media, fake news and the like. The concern hasn’t gone away but it’s been swamped by a lot of other concerns.
My early attempts at diarising used to include a breakdown of various figures, including my resting pulse rate and how much TV I’d watched that day. This would probably have been in about 1979, and it led me to concentrate fairly strongly on the fact. I was aware of why it was supposed to be a bad idea, and for me with my ADH”D” it was probably even worse, but I may have turned it into a bit of an obsession. It was also mixed with my disapproval of colour television, which was probably a means of dealing with cognitive dissonance, since we only had black and white, but also I clearly do have a kind of constitutional bias towards the monochrome because my teachers used to thing I was completely colour blind, since I only ever used ordinary pencils to draw pictures, completely un-self-consciously. Although my watching was rationed as a child, I was willing to manage that myself, and I found the world a fascinating place, spending a lot of time looking at things through microscopes, exploring nearby woods, lakes, streams and the back garden, doing stuff with chemicals and so forth, and also reading one heck of a lot.
I’ll take a guess that the 405-line TV set we had in my earlier childhood was probably about 18″, which is forty-five centimetres, as was the later PAL TV set. In 1978 this was replaced by a 12″ (thirty centimetre) screen portable which survived into the next century, despite being allegedly abused for years as a display for a ZX81, Jupiter Ace and Acorn Electron, the last of which eventually got a composite video CRT monitor with a vertical hold problem. This raises the second sense in which one might be watching “too much” television, as mentioned in an advert in about ’78: how big should the screen be? How far away? The girl watching the telly above is definitely too close.
From about 1980, I became an avid radio listener and preferred it to TV most of the time, because as the cliché has it, “the pictures are better on the radio”. I do in fact believe this has done my visual imagination a lot of good, and another effect it had was to crowd out TV watching. By 1982 I was only really watching the occasional programme on telly, mainly ‘Top Of The Pops’, and this continued through the ’80s with me watching less and less television until 1989, when I got a donated TV from the care home one of my flat mates worked at. I can still recall us all sitting in the living room eating dinner with the as yet not turned on television staring at us hypnotically like a baleful eye, willing us all to switch it on. However, I didn’t watch it for long because we didn’t have a licence and on being visited by the licence people I loaded it onto a shopping trolley and wheeled it round the corner to a friends’ house. That said, I did watch ‘Casualty’ from the start, and also ‘EastEnders’ for a while. Channel 4 was for a long time a closed book to me because it was practically impossible to watch with its reception. We lived very close to a TV mast and there was, I hear, a blind spot effect which meant we couldn’t really use it but had to use a more distant transmitter at the edge of its range. When I went to university, I used to watch television on Thursday evenings, that well-known peak of quality which most Gen-Xers in Britain will recall, during my first year.
TV news I have long held in considerable contempt, and this is not entirely due to any questions of political bias. No, the reasons I dislike television news is that the nature of the medium leads to a more subtle and kind of apolitical bias, as does journalism more generally. One problem with TV news is that it tends to approach stories (more on that word in a second) according to how visually effective they’re likely to be, and there’s a general tendency in journalism to sensationalise, to make something into a “story” when that’s not necessarily an accurate depiction of how events unfold, and to put a negative spin on issues. There’s also some personalisation when it’s inappropriate. Consequently I stopped watching TV news in 1986 and haven’t been keen on it ever since. The clinching moments were when a major NHS reorganisation occupied half the bulletin on the radio but a few seconds on the TV, and when a new England football manager was the first story on the TV news. Radio news has also suffered recently from an apparent merging of TV and radio news services, where we hear the audio from TV news reports instead of separate radio news reports. I may be wrong about this and would welcome input. However, none of this is about political bias as such, unless some kind of political leaning can be extracted from these issues. Maybe it can. But I would fully hope that someone with right wing views would agree with me on these points. Naturally I also believe that BBC news has a right wing bias but then I would, wouldn’t I? There’s also a tendency for news stories to be “discovered” when it has long been common knowledge for the groups affected.
I’ve just casually measured what I consider to be our fairly large television, and it came out at two cubits across diagonally. Apparently it’s a 32″, which in real money is eighty centimetres, so my guess is an overestimate. One of the nice things about the old 4:3 ratio of screens was that it meant the diagonal could be known to be five units across because of the 3:4:5 right angled triangle. The hypotenuse on a 16:9 screen is now ~18.3576, which is a bit of a mess. I also wonder about that ratio because it’s the opposite of portrait. What would it be like to have a portrait “channel” on TV? Much news footage nowadays is off people’s ‘phones, and consequently in a ratio which is more like 9:16, so there’s always the problem of the side bars, just as there used to be with the top and bottom with widescreen cinema on telly. I would imagine there’d be more talking heads on such a channel. Do we need tall telly?
My main point, though, is that the area of this not particularly large TV display is over a square metre. In the olden days a big colour TV would’ve been 26″, whose area was a fifth of that size. This is what I mean by “too much telly”. That said, it also appeals to me to think of an entire wall occupied by a display, although that display could then do things like double as a fake window, show wallpaper patterns and so forth. In a way it would cease to be a television. But then the old high-definition televisions used by the Nazis weren’t designed for programmes either. The Nazis had a slow-scan television system for transmitting maps and charts, so they were more like temporary faxes. High-definition TV has also existed in the sense we understand it today for quite some time. The French television system was apparently close to high-definition, being an 819-line standard, although to me it looked the same as PAL and I think they were phasing it out the first few times I went to France. I don’t understand how the French television system worked back then, or why they seem to have replaced it by what sounds like an inferior standard. Again, I’d welcome more information on this. Meanwhile in Japan, an 1125-line system was developed from 1979, although the visible resolution was only 1035, and like other television systems of the time it was interlaced rather than progressive. That is, alternate lines were displayed every other frame.
I tend to feel that a smaller screen dominates your life less than a larger one, and is less “hypnotic”. Nonetheless we do have a “large” television by the standards of a few decades ago, and we do watch a fair bit of TV.
We pursued a campaign of giving up television in the late ’90s to early ‘noughties. This began with us observing Lent by not watching television, and was motivated by our concern that the children did not self-moderate their television watching in spite of many claims that they did. The purchase of a PC capable of playing DVDs and the replacement of its CD-ROM drive in 2004 was supposed to seal the fate of television watching in our household. Unfortunately, this closely coincided with the beginning of YouTube and streaming services along with the popularity of DVD video, so it actually ended up with all of us having more screen time than when we’d used a television set to pick up broadcast analogue channels, so it didn’t really work. All of this also meant that to some extent the way TV works nowadays is a closed book to me, because I’ve never used it in that way. It also puzzled me that TV was so persistent. I expected it to be killed by YouTube, and later by streaming services, but this has not happened. I think there are two main reasons for that, one negative, one positive. On the negative side, TV watching tends to be a passive activity to some extent. People sit and watch it, or have it on in the background. The same isn’t true of streaming services because you actively have to seek out content. More positively, serendipity is a larger factor in TV watching, and this is good for several reasons. It means you get exposed to things you wouldn’t have sought out, which widens your experience, and it also means you don’t get channelled into a personal bubble.
I have a number of YouTube channels which I rarely bother with, although I went through a phase of pushing one of them for a year and it now has something like five hundred videos on it. In the process of doing so, I noticed that negative comments tended to be from accounts whose channels had no uploads. This might be due to people keeping troll accounts for the purposes of harassing other users, but more often I think it says something about the nature of trolling and something more general. As Sarada mentioned the other day, negative responses often seem to result from people holding themselves to impossibly high standards of content, which leads them not to produce their own content. This is a little like my criticism of multinational companies and tendency to do very little because sometimes it seems like doing anything carries the risk of harming others. Consequently it makes sense that negative YouTube comments are often from channels with no content. On the other hand, these users could be like people using YouTube as if it’s a television, in that they watch things but don’t contribute, and then feel entitled to complain about quality or opinions expressed for some reason. This probably isn’t helped by the constant drive towards impersonality and “safe” content by YouTube itself. The rewards, financial or otherwise, for the average YouTuber are practically zero, and in fact even before demonetisation was a thing there, I didn’t receive a single penny from them even though one of my channels had millions of views at that point and I’d followed all the instructions to link my bank account and all the rest. I don’t know how many other people are in my position.
There’s a famous Canadian television study called ‘The Impact of Television: A Study of Three Canadian Communities’, looking at the state of mainly children in three places in Canada, six months before and two years after the introduction of television. The studies looked at literacy, cognitive development, aggression, creativity, sexual stereotypes and a number of other features, and have been praised for their high quality. It was based on a town which wasn’t isolated but didn’t get television until 1973 because of the topography of the area. Due to paywalls and the serials crisis, I don’t have access to this work directly, but it did appear to demonstrate that the advent of television slowed literacy and cognitive development, and made children more aggressive. I would expect this still to be true but nowadays it isn’t feasible to do such a study, because those societies where there is little access to TV would differ in many other ways from those where there is, and because it’s so ubiquitous now. Also, television is no longer the only influence of this kind.
I also think television can encourage mental health problems in those who are more vulnerable. Whereas hearing voices is not in any way unhealthy, there are people whose voices either cause them distress because of the negative content of what they hear and also those who act upon those voices in a negative way, such as attempting to end their lives. When I used to work in a supermarket, the beeps of the tills used to haunt my dreams and I used to imagine I could hear them when I left work, although obviously I had insight into that. If a person has either talk radio or television on constantly in the background for company, their loneliness already being a risk factor for their mental well-being, I would expect them to be more likely to hear voices at other times and in other settings. Although it’s important not to stigmatise the hearing of voices per se, as it can be a very helpful and positive thing, when a particular person is negatively affected by it, it doesn’t seem like a good idea for them to be in an environment which encourages that impression. That said, this seems to apply as much to radio as it does to television.
All that said, I am a massive hypocrite, because I avidly follow and watch visual entertainment and documentaries on all sorts of platforms and devices. Nonetheless I welcome the onset of Friday evenings as a respite from that and plan to continue in this vein.
A Box Of Chocolates 