The Post-TV Diaries: Part 1
Well, it’s been about two months now. Taking the fact of our aerial breaking as a sign, we decided to give up television. And I can now be found waxing lyrical to anyone who will listen about the benefits of a TV-free life.
It’s not all easy though: last night I started to dream TV. An entire crap soap opera (well a pilot episode at least) sprung fully-formed from my sub-conscious, starring Nigel Havers as a floppy-hatted geologist, Sally out of Home & Away as a young oil heiress, and, predictably, Stephanie Beacham as her bitchy stepmother currently controlling the company and destroying important geological sites in the process.
Implications for my general mental health aside, the presence of an old character from Home & Away (lost to me for even longer than most programmes since it moved to Channel 5) raises a particular worry – for as a TV ‘abandoner’, like someone going blind as opposed to being born that way, I do have TV memories. And those memories will undoubtedly continue feed into my language, my identity, my perception of the world, and seemingly my dreams… But with no new TV ‘experiences’ to replace the memories, will I become a walking anachronism, stuck forever in a world of Friends, Frasier, Sex and the City, Big Brother 2003, and The Office, talking a language that nobody else can understand?