Originally Posted by Jim B.
I utterly despise American commercial television.
Back in 1958, I was 10 years old when my father bought the family a black and white new Magnavox television, ("The quality goes in before the name goes on") and it was strictly regulated, we could only watch the "FBI" show, "Walt Disney presents" and nothing else. Though my grandmother visited sometimes and for her, the "Lawrence Welk & his champagne music makers" was a Television show she liked to watch in our home.
In 1966 I left for college and never watched television any more.
It could be a force for good, maybe, but to me it has not been so; there are - inter alia - all those stupid sit coms with people in the background laughing at things that are not funny; the volume goes automatically up whenever all those terrible commercials - like ones with people holding up motor oil cans or butt paper rolls up to their phony, money-driven, smiling faces and imploring you to buy more crap.
New tract homes in the USA now are built with spaces like an altar in the living room, where your big television is supposed to be placed and worshipped.
Sometime in the late 1970s in the lunch room at work I overheard some women babbling on, excitedly, about some television show called "Charlie's Angels". I had utterly no idea who they were or what they did.
Years later, I read someplace that the Hollywood scriptwriters for this show - something to do with supposedly sexy women doing Police work, actually wrote the scripts so that they had to run up and down hills, so the viewers could watch their breasts bounce.
Good god. Gissa break, mon!!!
To me television in the USA is an utter waste of time.
Even my g/f who watches it sometimes, and is an RN, told me that a lot of Americans are so fat, because they see television commercials for food all day long, and then go and buy and eat way too much food. I had no idea of that. If true, how pathetic.
Though I had a very savvy African-American friend that was a deputy San Francisco Sheriff in the Court and County Jail section in the Hall of Justice.
On his shift, he told me he would tune all the Jail television sets to a show called "Soul Train" and the inmates liked it so much that he never had ANY problems on his watch.
So that was one effective use of it; but he told me once, "Jim, I swear, if I ever went to Jail, I tell you I would come out of there with a PhD."
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