HUMAN WRECKAGE
Baby Steps in a Brave New World
For quite sometime, maybe a year, Ann and I
had been kicking around the notion of revisiting our telecom-supplied TV
package. We paid for a service that was underutilized, or more frequently,
ignored. Last week we pulled the plug, or to be more precise, unscrewed the
cable – although you don’t actually even do that anymore.
The household television I remember best whilst
a nipper was a black-and-white portable in plastic housing that nestled on a
metal stand. Dad got it second-hand but I cannot remember from whom. It
replaced a hefty console model that displayed a lingering blue dot when turned
off, the star in Star Trek. The pace
of technological change was dizzying, vacuum tubes to solid state; next came colour
and cable - American channels – local programming from three US border
stations.
Our TV was always tucked down in the
basement with the furnace and exposed pipes, out of the way amid an array of
rummaged furniture. Watching it was not encouraged by my parents, there were
always better, more productive things to be done like reading a book, more fun
to be had outside. I did enjoy Batman,
Rat Patrol and Gunsmoke. I loved watching Mission:
Impossible with Dad. Some Sundays the entire family would watch The Ed Sullivan Show together; TV
dinners on TV trays! My favourite show was (and still is) Combat! starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason. My older brother used
to get me out of bed and sneak me downstairs to the basement past our parents
who were usually sitting in the living room to watch the World War II drama at
ten o’clock Saturday nights. Mom sat in the corner blind spot on the left-hand
side of the floral-patterned sofa and Dad, on the right, a veteran, always contrived
to look the other way.
With apologies to a doughy and curiously
smooth-skinned Don Johnson as Nash
Bridges, the last network show that engaged me was Homicide: Life on the Street. Around that time the sitcom Friends was inexplicably popular and
hell was the office the following morning: “Wasn’t Chandler hysterical!?”
“Isn’t Phoebe such a ditz!?” I tried to engage my colleagues: “Wouldn’t you
like to beat that whiny Ross to death with a Louisville Slugger?”
Oh! I
don’t need TV when I’ve got T.Rex – David Bowie
That
TV it just insults me freely – Iggy Pop
Fifty-seven
channels and nothing on – Bruce Springsteen
The rules of engagement with the arts,
entertainment industry, media and even advertising are based on a tacit
covenant: In exchange for your attention and your money you will receive
something positive in return, maybe important information, a welcome distraction,
a reliable and competively priced product or possibly even transcendental
bliss. Noble and ignoble providers alike frequently fail to deliver on their
half of the bargain. Potential benefits are neither guaranteed nor covered by
warranty; the small print can get awfully tiny – just click AGREE.
What is striking about the decline of
traditional television is how a mass medium has been re-imagined as something
much more personal, broadcast squeezed to narrowcast. As with any sea change
there is no single factor; all I know for certain is that habitual viewers no
longer watch the same show on the same channel at the same time anymore.
Digital signals changed water cooler conversation forever.
In an effort to boost the quality of the
content available in the TV room and reduce expenses, Ann and I purchased a Cupertino,
CA device, fittingly about the dimensions of a Rubik’s Cube, for a modest
amount. We now subscribe to just two streaming services. They should offer
enough viewing options to see us out as television is a relatively unimportant
facet of our lives. Meanwhile our monthly “cable” bill will shrink to a quarter
of what it was.
Ann worried that I might miss the sports channels.
Upon reviewing the past three years of my Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons
I can calculate my sports couch time in minutes. Potential sports “app creep”
on the Apple box is a non-starter, much like my entire athletic career. I told
Ann, “If there’s some massively important game I absolutely must watch, we’ll
go to a pub and share the experience with others. It’s more fun doing that,
anyways.”
Finally, there is the happy law of
unintended bonuses. I haven’t learned how to do this yet, but apparently I can
run YouTube through our television now. What this means is that whenever the
mood strikes me to re-fight World War II, I can watch as many episodes of Combat! as I want whenever I want. A few
of the good old days have returned, future past, in a strange new guise.