ia play

The sun’s out, summer is here. So inevitably TV is rubbish.

Euro 2008 and Big Brother have started (yawn).

CSI has finished till autumn. I didn’t get into season 2 of Heroes cause it was scheduled against House. So only House & Grey’ s Anatomy to see me through. Not sure Pileswasp will be happy about that amount of medical drama given the current frequency of visits to North Middlesex hospital.

There’s also River Cottage Spring to get our pig fix and I enjoyed the first part of Alexi Sayle’s Liverpool, so the second may be worth a look.

So that’s 4 hours of TV for the week. On-demand won’t help me here. There’s nothing there either.

The challenge is not to just turn the TV on at other times, for the sake of it. Might actually get some stuff done this week.

But only because they eat whilst watching TV, apparently.

“Changes in energy intake, but not changes in physical activity, were differentially related to changes in the targeted sedentary behavior. Reducing television viewing could affect energy intake by minimizing cues to eat and by decreasing exposure to television advertising.”

A Randomized Trial of the Effects of Reducing Television Viewing and Computer Use on Body Mass Index in Young Children

Yesterday’s Desert Island Discs featured Oliver Postgate, creator of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss. I listened in as my husband & I have an assortment of Postgate paraphernalia that we’ve carried with us from childhood, and some that we’ve picked up since. Postgate seems to make those programmes that become part of growing up.

He said he didn’t really think about how his creations would be received by children and instead focused on great stories to appeal to any age. He suggested that children would be patronised by programmes made just for kids.

The part of the interview that distracted me from lunch was when Kirsty Young mentioned that Postgate considered himself to be “a verb not a noun”. His sense of his own identity seemed intrinsically linked to continuously doing things, whatever those things were.

I’ve been reading Happiness - Lessons from a new science which began like an economist’s version of Authentic Happiness. So far so familiar. But then Layard moved onto the role of TV in our current state of happiness. He takes at face value the research suggesting TV makes us more violent and more miserable and didn’t really acknowledge that there was any academic debate about this at all (see Moving Experiences and Everything Bad is Good For You for alternative academic and populist perspectives).

I might have been more interested in the arguments than TV makes us unhappy if Layard hadn’t so unquestionably accepted the doctrine that TV makes us violent. Watching rubbish TV certainly stops me doing stuff. Some of that stuff is the dull routine of washing up, tidying, and mucking out the animals but it also stops me writing, reading, and making. It wastes my time. Or rather it is how I waste my time.

But watching brilliant TV is no less virtuous than watching a good film, play or musical. The problem seems to be with watching TV as a routine activity rather than a carefully chosen programme and so the arguments seem warped.

In the hierarchy of sinful media it seems that video games are the worst, then television, and then cinema. Novels and theatre aren’t on the scale. No-one tutted when I was taken to the National by my English teacher to see the gore-fest that is Macbeth. And that was real 3-d people conducting very believable acts of violence a few feet away.

At a historical re-creation in my teens, I remember chatting to a mother of two young children. She had got rid of the TV when her children were born and had been pleased that the toddlers were growing up peaceful and happy. Recently she said, her husband had taken the children to a medieval re-enactment that had featured jousting. She sighed as her youngest son galloped past us, twig masquerading as joust, endeavouring to impale any convenient passer-by. The next time I saw them, the TV had been re-instated.

I’m going to persevere with Happiness, hopefully the economic sections will include more sophisticated positions than the Daily Mail-esque ‘TV as moral crisis’.