No T.V. for me

My friend buttters complains of boredom and wishes to be entertained. He has asked me to: �Write a world with your words to alleviate this sense of anxiety arising from the depths of my mind lost somewhere in the television.� This means, I presume, that buttters spends his free time sitting in front of said electronic medium, mesmerized by the play of light and dark and colour across its screen (plasma or old-fashioned picture tube), his higher thought processes shut down, responding on auto-pilot to the pre-recorded laugh track or the studio audience laughing and applauding on cue. It�s a very sad thing when a mind is wasted like that. Very sad indeed.

I have eschewed the television as a source of entertainment. I now become equally comatose playing online spider solitaire or freecell, but at least I�m not being bombarded by commercials for products I neither need nor want. This was not always the case. We did not have a television when I was a little girl. It wasn�t until 1967 when my grandparents died and we inherited their black and white TV that the evil boob tube came into our house. All my neighbours were already throwing their first sets out and buying colour ones just out on the market. My parents put the old B&W set in the basement and forbade us from watching on school nights.

This didn�t stop my brothers and me from sneaking downstairs when they were out, though. On Monday nights they went to their film society, we would watch I Spy with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. I loved that show. Woe to us if we should hear the car come up the driveway early, and we quickly turned off the set and scrambled upstairs to act all sweet and innocent, reading a book or doing homework, missing out on the end of the episode. When we got our own television, it was not allowed to the kids on school nights either. I monitored that rather strictly.

Eventually the television was moved out of the basement and into the livingroom, although I never developed the TV habit. My dad would sit in front of the tube and watch Laugh-In and other comedy programmes (we�re talking 1970s here, think Red Skelton, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller) with a clipboard on his lap, writing down jokes that actually made him laugh and then recycling them as his own. He was like that. But I didn�t watch it much myself. My parents liked to watch All in the Family and I remember leaving partway through a show because it just made me so angry. I realize now it was a farce, but people like Archie Bunker bugged me then and still do.

Anyway, when we finally got a television of our own (1992 or thereabouts), I wouldn�t at first have anything to do with it. I was really rather outraged that this abomination had entered our house. Eventually, however, I fell totally under its thrall as I caught up on popular culture. Then I narrowed my viewing down to a couple of shows (I taped reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation and watched them after I�d finished my work for the night). Now I watch nothing. Since they took Enterprise off the air, I have no interest in anything else. Occasionally I will join my husband or son as they watch something, but on my own the television may as well not be there.

I would suggest to my friend buttters that he turn off his television, pick up a book, go for a walk, call a friend on the telephone, get a pet, or take up a hobby that gets him out of the house (pottery is a good one) and away from the evil television, before he finds that there is nothing left of his intellect and that what�s left of his brain has turned to a soupy mush.

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