PG TV

I stopped watching TV some time ago. For all intents and purposes anyway. What I do now is that incidental use thing.

Initially it was due to a general disinterest and irritation at the content. Heard all the jokes, seen all the plots and that kind of thing. Then came work. After a while all I wanted to do when I got home was sleep. All I wanted to do with any free time that came my way. Then there was the other motivator. The fact that increasingly, there would be situations where either me or my mum would have to walk out of the sitting room.

There was a time when that kind of thing was predictable. Depending on how the weekend movie started you could make a calculated judgment on whether to stay on with the rest of the folks, or feign tiredness and get yourself out of a potentially squirmy situation. And that was pretty much it. Nowadays, you have no way of telling what'll show up on the tube. You're sitting there watching some innocent sounding or looking something or other and all of a sudden the conversation starts to go south. Or the pictures. You have to reach for a newspaper or something, only we don't buy newspapers so there's none lying about. The only option is to get up, head for a drink of water and out of there. Once that kind of thing happens a couple of times, you learn to avoid that whole scene and just listen to the radio instead.