Back in the year of our Lord 1992, Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen had just released a new album called Human Touch and very good it was, too. One of my favourite tracks was 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On) in which the narrator describes how we have all manner of entertainment choices but we get little or no satisfaction from it. The passage of time – it is hard to call it progress – has given us even more entertainment choices and Christ knows how many more channels and TV stations, and things are worse than ever.
I can still remember when there were two TV channels, neither of which operated during daytime. Slowly, at first, and later at breakneck speed new channels kept coming along, usually driven by broadcasters’ desire to make money from charging people to watch sport, but now the new channels offer us all manner of additional programmes. We don’t have all the channels and despite that we don’t have the time to watch everything that’s advertised. Then again, would we really want to?
While watching Liverpool being hopelessly outclassed by Qatar’s own Paris Saint-Germain last night on the TNT sports channel, we were bombarded with adverts for HBO who have launched their channels in the UK and have bought TNT as part of their offer to us viewers. With packages ranging from £5.99 a month to £14.99 a month, we can have access to HBO’s shows, many of which are ancient and have been shown many times before. For a mere £30.99 a month, we can have TNT sports as well, a channel that is about to lose European Champions League football and has already lost European Cup rugby union to yet another provider, Premier Sports. For the time being, we still get TNT via our Virgin rip-off package but once it ends up costing even more, it can go.
We don’t get all the channels anyway and are not tempted to acquire them. It’s not just the money – we could always stop eating if we wanted more channels – but it’s also the potential waste of our lives. There is so much to do out there in the world without watching re-reruns of The Sopranos, Friends and Game Of Thrones, not that I saw any of these shows in the first place. But I do know people, quite a lot of people as it happens, who have subscribed to all the channels and think nothing of it.
I am certainly at the age where it might be expected I’d be spending my remaining days propped up in front of the crystal bucket, brainlessly watching This Morning, re-reruns of Heartbeat and Midsomer Murders and Bargain Loving Brits On The Piss in Spain (I think it’s called something like that), but I don’t want to. I am still, just, capable of having a walk around the local park, reading a book without falling asleep, I am not too deaf to listen to music and I can even write some piss poor copy for this blog. All day TV viewing is not yet my only option in life. But I still worry: do I watch too much of it?
I probably do, although I suspect I watch less than some other folk. I do not watch soaps, I watch very little football on the telly and like many of you rarely watch ‘live’ TV, preferring ‘on demand’ services. That, for me, is a positive thing, picking and choosing what I want to watch, rather than brainlessly watching whatever comes on and then scrabbling around with the remote trying to find something vaguely watchable. I know what that’s like and I recall with not a small amount of horror where I last saw people doing that: in care homes.
Shows like This Morning, Bargain Hunt, Escape To The Country and, yes, Bargain Loving Brits On The Piss in Spain were, I feel, invented both for the hard of thinking who can’t find anything else useful to do and those in cognitive decline who literally can’t think at all. In our ageing society, it is good that such shows exist. It’s just that I don’t want to be among that number. Yet.
You can see that I was not convinced by HBO’s kind offer to charge me for spending even more of my remaining time on Earth watching completely forgettable TV shows and that watching even more telly programmes is not a part of my current plans. Frankly, Liverpool’s thumping in Paris was depressing enough. I dread to think the distress I would feel if I was forced to watch “All of Harry Potter”, eight dreary movies of him. Thanks but no thanks, HBO, DAZN, Paramount and all the other providers desperate for my money. I’ve got a life to live, at least for now.
