September 8, 2005

Six months ago, Amelia Hill turned off her telly for good. Here, she reveals why she fell out with her `friend in the corner’ and decided to start thinking outside the box

It is sometimes asked, in today’s liberal, libidinous society, whether there is anything left with the power to shock. Well, there is. It’s the simplest, easiest thing in the world to do and I discovered it almost by accident.

When I told my friends that I was throwing out my television there was disbelief, disapproval, confusion and consternation: what on earth was I going to do instead? Wasn’t I going to be bored? Wasn’t I cutting myself off from society and setting myself up to be isolated? Essentially, why on earth would I want to do such a thing?

I had no real answer for the final question, except that I wanted the answers to the first few. I didn’t give up television to make a political point. I was simply curious to see how I would cope. I never intended it to be a permanent situation, far from it: the night I took my set to my friends’ house; carrying it with the loving tenderness usually reserved for a sleeping child, I went to great pains to emphasize that I was reserving the absolute right to collect it at a moment’s notice should my experiment prove too tormenting to endure.

I randomly decided to give my new lifestyle three months. It was, I thought, long enough to undergo both a complete detox and the construction of an alternative routine, but not long enough to lose track of how ER’s Dr Carter was coping with his broken heart, or whether Bree’s attempts to save her marriage in Desperate Housewives had succeeded.

Six months later and, as much to my surprise as anyone’s, I’m still TV less. Dr Carter’s love life and the travails of Wistaria Lane’s mildly creepy residents are a distant memory. Every day I have less interest in their worlds and even less inclination to ask for my television back.

The enormous impact of doing something as simple as giving up television has amazed me. Lifelong familiarity with an advertising world that presents its greatest lies on the promise that a single action –– generally the purchase of a product –– can transform my life had made me cynical that any fundamental personal change could come about without some dramatic epiphany or long, sustained effort.

But -– and it is hard to write this without sounding evangelical -–– giving up television succeeded where all the money-driven, cynical, empty promises failed: this one, a simple act has fundamentally transformed the quality of my life.

Let me explain. I had never watched excessive amounts of television and had never been one for random channel-hopping. On the contrary, over the past few years I developed a cosy, obsessive ritual of sitting down on a Sunday morning with the TV guide and pre-recording all the programmes I wanted to watch in the week ahead.

But the fact that I was watching decent television just made the problem worse: I would come home between nine and 11 pm most nights and flick on the video, intending to unwind with just half an hour of a quality, pre-recorded programme.

Perhaps it is down to my weak will, or perhaps -– perish the thought -– I was just another nightly notch on the bedpost of the enormous industry of bright, well-paid people whose job it is to make sure no one ever watches `just half an hour’, but every evening, before I even knew the time had slipped by, I would find myself slumped on the sofa with two hours’ worth of programmes behind me and still powerless to resist the rerun of Will and Grace just beginning to flicker on the screen.Worse than finding the evening had slipped by unnoticed, when I eventually wrenched myself from goggle-eyed oblivion, I’d realize that if I had switched on the TV to escape boredom, dissatisfaction or upset, I had simply managed to extend those feelings.

Far from feeling relaxed or pleasantly tired, I felt flat, bloated and stultified. Even so, contemplating life without a television was alien territory. While celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Madonna and Steven Spielberg have pledged minimal-to-zero viewing for themselves and their children, television for most of us is a staple of modern life: among the first things we buy when moving into a new property and the only one that automatically becomes the heart and focus of whichever room ends up being its home.

For others, television is not just a prosaic necessity but a semi-mystical entity. Big Brother’s Ahmed Aghil sent shivers up my spine last year when he explained his urge to appear on the programme with the words: ,`I’m doing [it] to confirm my existence.’ While Aghil is, obviously, an extreme case, there are many who agree with Julie Burchill -–– who, despite maintaining that she barely watches the thing and regards it as `a really pleasant but slightly backward old relative who’s just chatting to themselves in the corner,’ keeps her set on from daybreak to sunset because `If it wasn’t there, I would go mad.’

The most unnerving thing about giving up television was that, despite regarding a plastic box as being considerably further down the foodchain than even the dottiest of ageing relatives, I discovered it was far more difficult than I’d anticipated to find new things to do with my time.

At the beginning, I didn’t find anything new to do at all. Instead, I spent my first week without television camping on the sofa of the friends who had taken my set, with my eyes lovingly glued to its screen. I was only forced to take the next step to protect my pride after they joked once too often and once too seriously that perhaps I should simply take the set home and consider the experiment a failure.

Enough was enough, I decided: I had to go cold TV-turkey. That was when I realized that television viewing is an addiction and that even though I wasn’t watching the damn thing, I couldn’t let it alone. I felt a nagging absence in my life, as though I was missing something important or leaving real friends in the lurch, and began seeking out little hits in any benign form that I could find.

I took to shamelessly turning conversations around to television so I could gel plot updates, and `accidentally’ calling friends when certain programmes were on, so they could talk me through the breaking news. But my favourite trick was scouring the tabloids, which I was delighted to discover, treat TV characters as even more newsworthy than real people, possibly because they axe prettier and live more eventful lives.

But as the electronic binds gradually loosened, I realized I was changing. Without noticing it happen, I was becoming calmer, more relaxed and more energetic. I was getting home to find bed seeming a long way off and work the next day somewhere in the distant future. I was sleeping better and longer. I was happier, felt my moods were more balanced and, as nonsensical as it might sound, I felt I was seeing the world through kinder eyes.

Initially I was baffled as to why this should be the case. I looked for other reasons: wasn’t I relaxed simply because I had been on holiday? But as the usual ebb and flow of life surged by, these new-found character traits remained constant, and it is only with the clear eyes that six months’ distance from television has given me, that I have begun to work out why.

But while it is a bully, television wins hearts and minds by seducing at the same time that it oppresses. Viewers are encouraged to shower scorn over those they survey. Is it too outlandish a suggestion that, once lulled into making such harsh criticism, we exercise this on real people?

Ron Bracey, a chartered psychologist at the Alpha Hospital in Working who specializes in emotional problems, supports this train of thought. “I see people all the time whose belief systems have been completely screwed up by television,” he says.

“It distorts their view of social convention and of what they think of as normal. We think we know what healthy social interactions and relationships are like, and usually we do because we have built up that knowledge gradually as we meet people and relate to them, but the problem is that the constant trickle of TV distorts what we think we know until it is unrecognizable.

By the age of 18, the average child has sat through 16,000 murders and 200,000 assorted acts of violence. I am 32 ––- more than old enough to do the maths.

But perhaps I’m taking it all too seriously. Dr Barrie Gunter, professor of mass communication at the University of Leicester and a former head of research at the independent Broadcasting Authority, believes that it is only unusually insecure people who use television to make unfavourable comparisons with themselves and their lives.

In general, he maintains, television is simply harmless fun and is more likely to be a force for the good than the bad. “The average person’s television diet is not filled with chaos and mayhem but with a range of programmes that could have positive and negative effects on any of us, depending on the mood and frame of mind we are in at the time,” he says.

“Primetime television is full of reality shows and home improvement programmes. Even programmes that show a degree of conflict usually have a positive outcome,” he adds.

The typical Briton now spends over four hours a day ––- more time over a lifetime than he or she spends doing paid work ––- watching TV. This time largely comes out of our social life. Pre-school children watch more than two hours a day, with 86 per cent of children aged six and below watching up to six hours of TV a day.

So what do I do? Nothing particularly impressive or constructive. I ring friends, talk to neighbours, book theatre and cinema dates, then go out for dinner and get drunk. I reread old books and discover new ones. I go for walks and I do all the old-fashioned pottering, irresponsible and irrelevant things people have done for thousands of years.

I remain, however, lingeringly uneasy about my choice. I have not yet decided, for example, whether even the manifold benefits of being without TV can justify the sacrifice of a 24-hour supply of news.

Radio 4 is a long-loved friend, but when the London bombings happened, I craved images, breaking news and late-night analysis. I am also troubled by a nagging feeling of hypocrisy: I have a sideline working on the BBC Breakfast News and although I can genuinely say that appearing on television is a lot more fun than watching a great deal of its output, it is a circle of argument I have yet to satisfactorily square.

I also fret about what I will do during the brief, but challenging, periods when a programme becomes essential viewing.

How could I have made small talk if hadn’t know the Little Britain catchphrases; and what if the new Ricky Gervais series, Extras, proves just as vital in oiling the small-talk wheels of the day? Just as importantly, I loved watching Sex and the City,

The Sopranos and ER — why deny myself that pleasure next time something as good comes by?

But here is where I part company with many other non-TV owners. Having given up the beast for six months, I can boast a much clearer sight of the insidious nature of much of what television offers, but I am still no absolutist. A great deal of television might be poor, unpleasant, manipulative and dull, but there is a significant minority of it that is intelligent, informative and absorbingly excellent. —Dawn/ Observer Service

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