Like all devastating moments in life, it hit me at the most
vulnerable and unexpected of times.
Following the weekday routine of returning home begrudgingly
late from work and setting the smoke alarm off with my meal for one, I was
ready to let my brain decompose to the tune of Channel 4’s Dr Christian dishing
out advice to an elderly man with a fungal community thriving inside his belly
button.
I flicked between channels, greeted by a barrage of fuzz.
Distraught that my fish finger sandwich may be getting cold, I picked a brief
fight with the TV aerial socket, giving up just before the fuzz burnt permanently
into my retina and switching the bastard off.
Apparently it wasn’t just the over 75’s, who think they can
operate their televisions through their alarm clock radios, who needed help with
the digital switchover. I’d overlooked the simple act of buying a freeview box,
in favour of spending my last fifteen quid bulk buying fish fingers at Asda.
I’d ignored all those bus stop posters thinking they were
adverts for the latest Pixar movies and I had fallen victim to the digital
switchover.
Yes, I know. I am a new, never before discovered breed of
fucktard.
Two months later I am still sharing my home with a snow
machine. It’s no surprise that watching the squark box is the UK’s most popular
past time, with about 96% of the population owning a TV (and the other 4%
hiding theirs since they looted it from last year’s riots)…
People’s reaction to hearing that I’m telly-less is pretty consistent:
through untrusting, narrowed eyes the inevitable question, “What do you do all evening then…?” will always
arise.
Before answering, “I plug my nose with dried chickpeas and perform
handstands and time how long it takes for each one to plop out” I always think:
it’s shit not having TV.
Of course I never say this. Instead I list pleasant things
which occupy my time such as reading and exercising and catching up with
friends, all sounding ever so healthy and fruitful, but you’d be wrong to think
that an extra 30 hours a week to dedicate to productive past-times makes up for
being a televisual retard.
The following areas of life seem to have taken the hardest hit:
WORK
You will never realise how little you have in common with
your work colleagues until an in depth discussion about the goings on at Albert
Square is taken off the small talk menu. And there is nowhere for the
conversation to go when someone in the office asks you if you saw last night’s
Apprentice as they physically shake on their Alan Sugar high and you respond,
“No, I don’t actually watch TV.” They’ll
instantly loose their telly boner and either a) continue with the above
suspicious grilling or b) regale you with all the events of a program you know
nothing about anway: leaving you unsatisfied like a selfish lover.
CULTURE
Magazines will isolate you too as they fill up their pages
with someone called Snooki and clans of scantily clad people with jaundice from
Essex. Browse the covers on magazine stands at your peril as you exclaim to the
elderly lady next to you in Sainsburys: “Max did WHAT?! Did YOU know about
this?!”
HOME
Dinner has become a painful activity which only reminds you
of your long lost companion as you eat in silence, on a sofa which inexplicably
faces a deceased television, just staring back at you symbolising the cultural
black hole you’ve disappeared into.
FRIENDS
Going to visit friends can carry its casualties too for the
televisual pariah. Once you’ve managed to hold a conversation that doesn’t
involve X-Academy-Voice-On Ice- Strictly- Talent- Factor, you find yourself transfixed
by the quiet telly which is on in the background. It might just be Nick Knowles
spreading plaster, but to the visually starved this is pornographic sustenance.
Your now former friend will understandably ask you to leave before your
telly-comatose dribble hits the living room carpet.
Of course, there are always online catch up sites, but they
are no worthy substitute. No one likes
hunching over their laptop in bed like a pervy fifteen year old watching Tulisca’s
sex tape, and when your already dicky internet connection decides to freeze your
stream of telly crack every two and a half minutes it can really ruin the punch
lines on Have I Got News For You.
Twitter is probably the only other substitute for actually
watching the television. Following an evening of hashtags is better than the
box, as you see events unfold through pithy pisstake versions of everything
from Made In Chelsea to Newsnight.
Of course to join in would be an absolute treat. Luckily I
ordered my new freeview box from Argos online about four paragraphs ago, and finally
my days as a TV wallflower are numbered.
