All those wasted hours

After some years of watching virtually no terrestrial television, when I do catch a glimpse it comes across as curiously depressing. Not head in hands, is it all worth it, goodbye cruel world depressing. No, television depression stems from its tendency to suppress. It is a know your place kind of suppression, a don’t step out of your social shell because you can’t kind of suppression.

What is more, it isn’t depressing until we step outside the television world and see the suppression for what it is. Until then it is a kind of latent depression, a willingly chained soul kind of depression where many things may be amusing but nothing is stimulating. Even cookery programmes have morphed into a you can’t cook like this but you can watch us version of talking down to the chained souls.

TV comedy poked fun at stereotypes but in doing so it poked fun at ordinary people.

TV soaps are populated by emotionally incontinent ineffectual losers.

TV news is relentlessly negative and this is what lingers, not the amusing snippet at the end where the presenter ekes out a faint smile.

TV weather is relentlessly negative. Even good weather carries health warnings about exposure to the sun.

TV drama is unrelentingly grim. Mostly people scowling at each other.

Even celebrity interviews show the audience what they cannot possibly be.

Television is not one hundred percent gloom of course. To many viewers would probably switch off if there no reasons to be cheerful and in any event gloom is not what it sells. What television does is to suppress the spark of individual inspiration, the joy of life, the realisation that there is a world of limitless fascination out there. Television is limited and viewers are persuaded to accept those limitations.

That’s how television suppresses and why looking back tends to depress those who escaped. All those wasted hours…