Television

Television

When I was a kid we didn’t have one. The kid next door did and although he was a right little prick, he was everybody’s friend when ‘Popeye’ and ‘The Road Runner’ were on.

One day, I came home from school and we had one sitting in a corner of the living room, it had a 14 inch screen and was black and white. We had a choice of two channels and it had a round knobby thing that you used to swap between them. I wasn’t allowed to touch it and decided there and then that I didn’t like the bastards anyway.

When I was at Uni, I don’t recall if we had one in the share house, if we did, I very rarely watched it. We did have one in the Students Union, it was in a smallish room, that was usually deserted, apart from a few sad sacks.

However, once a week it was heaving with bodies, crammed in watching ‘Top of the Pops’. With Flick Colby’s scantily clad dancers leaping around, to the weeks hits, when the artists weren’t around to lip-sync. It’s amazing that I can remember her name, forty years later, but I can scarcely remember my own. TotP was followed by Monty Python, need I say more?

When I was in South Africa 1971-1973, they were amazingly civilised and didn’t have TV, which was a blessing. Come to think of it, there were a lot of things they didn’t have, Playboy was banned, along with nudity in general. In case the Boer’s lust was inflamed by the sight of naked tits. They might have forgotten to go to the NGK and learned the Old Testament by heart, in the original Afrikaaner Tongue. Didn’t know that God was an Afrikaaner, I bet! Did you eh?

After that I went to Australia where they did have TV, it might even have been in colour and they certainly had nudity. Not that it induced me to watch it, I belong to the school of thought that ‘If you’ve seen one tit, you’ve seen ‘em both’ and what’s the point of looking at them anyway?

As a family, at the last count (yesterday), we had six of them, TV’s that is. (It could be more now, the suckers breed like cane toads). They all have different remote controls and what makes it worse they are con-joined with other things like VCR’s, CD players, surround-sound speakers, toasters, karaokes, souffle-makers, games players etc. and each of them has a remote control.

If you look at the back of a typical TV, you’ll see more cabling than Mission Control in Houston. So things have turned full circle, instead of my parents banning me from touching the damn things. As a parent I’ve banned myself from touching them, in case I blow the souffle-maker to smithereeens.

So that’s it as far as I’m concerned. There are some good shows on, but they are so riddled with adverts, or on the stations where ads are banned, promo’s for upcoming shite, repeated ad nauseam, that they become unwatchable.

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull