The Love

 When I was young, as many do, I had a love affair with Television.  I guess to some extent this affair has not ended with growing up and for that matter, it isn’t ever likely to.  When I was little it was a little different though.  In those days I lived in a tiny little community in the vast hinterlands of northern British Columbia.  I chose to allow television to be my window into the rest of the world.  An introduction to places where everything is not hunting, snow-mobiling and a selection of jokes to fit virtually every form of bigotry. 

 Now I grant you that allowing CBC, the one channel we had until I was 11, to be my window might not have been the best choice, but it was, after all, the only choice.  I assume there was a danger of turning out fairly screwed up with my version of the world being defined by shows like Hockey Night in Canada, M.A.S.H and the practically infinite reruns of Three’s Company.  Not to mention such disturbing Canadian efforts as The Littlest Hobo, The King of Kensington, or The Beachcombers.  I guess I am lucky in that I went another way, that I managed to become the moderately stable person that I am.  A person with a complex understanding of the world around me, even as I now live in the big city. 

 Something else I learned, a skill I try at times to expunge from my repertoire of skills I could better live without, is the ability to watch and find some enjoyment in just about anything. I already mentioned Hockey Night in Canada, it gets worse though.  I could even watch The Edge of Night, or, and this really shames me, Sunday morning religious programming.  In my own defense though, what would you do when it is –40° C outside, you have read all the books in the house, twice, your brother would rather beat on you than play with you, the notion of a whole and useable crayon is a distant memory and somehow you have managed to misplace every single useful Lego piece that came with the set?  That’s right, the one show that is on, becomes a gift from heaven (no specific pun to Sunday morning religious programming intended).

 I like to think that now, many years of character and brain building later, that I have learned to surpass this sort of thing, that today I am a viewer with some sense of class and discernment.  And for the most part, this is true. Today I mostly watch the good shows, with some sort of sense of reality, drama or at least the irony and satire of life.  I cannot, however, claim at any point to have found a complete cure.  You can find proof of this fact in the confession that not only will I stop flicking on the show Andromeda but that I will actually see it in my onscreen, interactive program guide and turn to it before I have eve seen what might be on further down the channel list.  But dammit, not all good TV is Good TV, if you know what I mean.

 What has television given me in my life beside the chronic avoidance of frostbite and a pair of unhealthy eyes?  Simple, I think.  It has given me the ability to view the world through a set of critical eyes.  Where ic an pick through the garbage and crap of what I see before me for what is real and important.  I grant you that I may have watched Three’s Company near seven hundred thousand times but I also figured out very young that not everything in life is a mix up.  I think I did manage to walk away with the notion that even if Jack was gay, so what?  Why would that have to mean anything different?  And even stranger, through Larry and Jack, I think that I began to learn the lesson that suggest that while it is normal and fine to have a healthy interest in sex that women are just as much people as I am.  They deserve as much, or knowing me as I do, more respect than I accord myself.

It was from learning what you can’t see in a TV show that I began to learn a good to place to exist in this reality.  I don’t believe, as I look back at Jack and Larry that there was a serious intent, satirical or otherwise, for the viewer to learn a lesson of respect.  But I do believe that this is what TV can do for you if you really watch it.   Because, you see, everything you watch has been through a reality filter, it has been written by somebody. This means that you get to see some facet of reality in a way that someone else has.  What better way can there be to learn to think about the world yourself than to see the way other people see it and reconcile this within your own world views. 

 Actually, as I think of this now, I believe that herein lays the reason that I hate reality based TV shows.  I get to watch and learn from real people all day, all the time but in a reality-based show, we are voiding the filter, skipping the writer. I am no longer seeing the way someone else interprets the world but instead the way the world is.  Well hell, I can do that on my own time thanks, just by walking out the front door with my eyes open.

 I love TV for what it can do for you. I love the way that even in the most inane show there is something new to see and learn. I don’t recommend you watch Y & R for the life’s lessons it teaches, but if you enjoy the show, trust me that if you watch it with the right mind, you will learn something valuable.  So, now, for myself, I maximize my time by watching the shows that I enjoy because they are good, knowing that anything I watched would still have value.  I don’t sit on my couch and feel guilty.  After all TV is an enriching and educational experience.

 For the record, even when young, I never watched the Farm Report.

First published on BoobToob.net in Oct of 2001 (now dead)

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