V or not TV?

It’s International TV Turnoff Week. Great idea, says Laura ’telly-phobe’ Barton. Over my dead body, says Lucy ’square-eyes’ Mangan

Turn it off!

There are 17 words that broadly sum up my argument against TV, and they first appeared in the gaudy theme tune of a children’s programme of the 1970s and 80s. "Why don’t you ... just switch off your television set," it goaded, "and go and do something less boring instead?"

A little over a year ago, I pretty much stopped watching television. It didn’t have anything to do with the annual International TV Turnoff Week, it wasn’t some flouncy moral statement, it wasn’t a social experiment, it wasn’t even a decision. I just stopped caring about it. It was, I suppose, a little like realising you have fallen out of love with someone.

Oh, there was a time, before we drifted apart, before we would sit together in the same room in stony silence and avoiding eye contact, when I was quite blushingly infatuated with television. So huge, in fact, was my crush that I even memorised its timetable. And I loved it for years, through The Flumps, Twin Peaks, Blue Planet and onwards. I’ve adored all that it had given us, from Cathy Come Home and Monty Python to Abigail’s Party and Talking Heads. There was a period where I would record Neighbours, a time when I watched Coronation Street and nigh on every home makeover show; there was even a stage when I scurried home to watch Wife Swap.

But I no longer plot my week around the TV listings or idly warm up the television set for want of something else to do. Indeed, on the few occasions I have watched anything in the past 12 months I have found it unappetisingly bland - like eating processed cheese or a microwaved lasagne. Take the new Doctor Who, for example. I caught an episode on Christmas Day, and it was all right, in the same way that driving along the A565 between Tarleton and Southport is all right. I tried to enliven events with copious quantities of sherry, but not even the warm burr of alcohol could counter the fact that I was bored after five minutes and began wishing the BBC would show adverts so that I might be shaken from my stupor by all the bright colours and loud jingles.

I’m sure there are good things to see on TV. I’m simply not convinced that it’s something you need to watch every single day. I’ve made occasional returns, for episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm or South Park or Phoenix Nights. But generally, it’s as if watching a certain amount of television lowers your expectations and you fail to notice that you are being offered ideas so overchewed that you have been left with a sort of spittly cud.

Mostly, I don’t give a damn whether or not other people watch television. That’s their business, like their choice of birth control or the way they cut their sandwiches. What I do object to is people who cannot believe that my personal idea of hell is a night curled up on the sofa in a pair of jogging bottoms with my beloved and a take-away. No, I tell them, I do not feel saddened by the passing of Grandstand; somehow I shall struggle on. Or those who yada on about television being the finest modern art form. And the way the entire country is enslaved by TV. We may be a secular nation, but we find it in our sceptical little hearts to believe feverishly in our soap operas and attend their services daily. When Mike Baldwin died on Corrie, it took up double-page spreads in our national newspapers. The country was apparently in mourning. All right, people, let me spell it out, nice and slow: it’s. Not. Real.

But we have become a slovenly nation of living, breathing, wan-faced sponge fingers, entranced by some blinking, bawling machine. The average person in the UK spends around three and a half hours a day watching TV, video or DVDs. Three and a half hours a day, 26 hours a week, 1,352 hours a year. What it really boils down to is this: the world is a wonderful place and there are so many better things to do with your time. Go out, punt about on the internet, listen to music, read poetry, go to gigs, the flicks, the theatre, dancing, attend a lecture, have a conversation, visit the seaside, or just walk down your street and smell the trees in bud.

Twelve months ago I was simply overwhelmed by the realisation that life is very short and frankly, I don’t want to waste any of it. I want to seize it by the lapels and kiss it. When you look back on your life, will you really believe you have sucked all the marrow out of your days by watching countless episodes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Prison Break? Why not do something less boring instead? LB

Keep it on!

Homer Simpson, of course, put it best. As he clutched his television cable to his breast, the portly modern icon summed up the feelings of a generation as he rent the air with the heartfelt cry: "How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness!?" Forgive the exclamation-plus-question mark. You do the best you can, but written punctuation is a paltry resource when attempting to do justice to the emotional articulation of a perfect truth.

Honestly - how can anyone not love a machine that devotes itself entirely to your service, that asks no reward, that has no ulterior motives, no purpose but to entertain? And, even better, does not require one to get dressed, or leave the house, or interact in any way with the roiling, filthy mass of humanity that lies just beyond one’s deadlocked and bolted front door?

Understand this. When I talk about television, I am talking about my best friend. A best friend who grants me access to all my others. It delivers fleeting acquaintanceships in one-off documentaries and dramas (1989 - A Wanted Man, by Malcolm McKay, starring Michael Fitzgerald, long vanished into the ether but still the best thing ever made, for any medium), to longer-term relationships with brilliant but finite series (Profit, Due South, Homicide: Life on the Street, Friends, Buffy the Vampire Slayer - though obviously I can revisit fond memories in syndicated and DVD form for ever), through to lifelong stalwarts such as Coronation Street. I have recognised the theme tune for as long as I have recognised my mother (partly because she only hove into view when the first bars played. It’s a pity it didn’t go four times a week a bit earlier - then I needn’t have starved through the late 70s). And although I will never bond with EastEnders in the same way, it still means something to me that I was there at its inception and that we are both still moseying along together.

Of course television isn’t perfect. I hate all clip shows and reality chod, especially the stuff involving islands, airports or Gillian McKeith, and I lament the fact that they are part of the reason that A Wanted Man remains locked in a vault along with various gilded but forgotten Bleasdale, Russell and Rosenthal scripts, while their counterparts in the next generation give up hoping for an hour-long prime-time slot for their fermenting masterpieces and go and write Jimmy Carr links for Your 100 Favourite Bits of Kaka from Last Thursday instead.

But. But. There is still so much that is good, at least in the sense of high-calibre entertainment, even if it doesn’t do much in the way of illuminating the human condition. I got as much as I could stomach of that from books when I was younger anyway. Open Heat magazine at the listings section (sacred text for all those of us who worship at the televisual altar) and bounty spills forth. QI and its canny coupling of Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, which manages to condense tweedy goodness, cockney charm, pub trivia and class war into one half-hour; the kinetic pleasures of Never Mind the Buzzcocks; CSI proffering another brace of solvable murders and sweet fictional balm to an audience awash in the messy business of real life and crime; the profound satisfaction of watching ER and House’s array of life-threatening diseases surrendering before the might of western medicine; the utterly pointless brilliance - or utterly brilliant pointlessness - of Prison Break. And then there’s Green Wing finally completing, via a performance of fibrillating lunacy by Michelle Gomez, the journey begun by Smack the Pony to allow women to be funny by acting as bonkers as any male actor. And Location, Location, Location, whose glorious combination of Kirstie Allsopp, Phil Spencer and property prices makes it a programme uniquely able to trigger at least two deviant sexual impulses in each and every person in the country. Ooh, and Desperate Housewives continuing its brave research into just how many vests Teri Hatcher can wear at once now that she has the dimensions of a cigarette, and whether multi-layering an actress means you can get away with a single-ply plot for an entire 84-part series.

I love it. I love it all. It nurtures, it soothes, it never talks over itself and it’s all but free of charge. The world comes to me at my behest and in manageable, brightly lit chunks. Like all the best pursuits, it is solitary and effortless. Sit back. No, lie down. Relax. Enjoy. Nothing bad can happen now. Celebrity Love Island doesn’t start till summer.