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- Turn TV Off April 23-29, Please!
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- paul sullivan
This is a timely piece to play during April 23-29. Backed by stats from the Turn TV off Network, I talk about TV useage today compared with TV at its birth.
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Piece Description
This is a timely piece to play during April 23-29. Backed by stats from the Turn TV off Network, I talk about TV useage today compared with TV at its birth.
Transcript
This week is National TV Turn-off Week. Critics of TV claim watching too much makes us fat, lazy and violent. Watching less, they say, promotes healthier lifestyles and more engaging communities.
An average American youth is in school about 900 hours a year. In the same year, the kid watches 1,023 hours of TV. Couple that statistic with the obesity epidemic and perhaps you can share my concern. I don't see many fat kids playing soccer or baseball.
Some of us arrived home from the hospital to find a TV in our nursery while some older people recall the arrival of their family's first TV in much the same way as they remember what they were doing when they first heard President Kennedy was shot.
My family's first TV was a 1950 Du Mont. It looked like our console radio except it had a little gray screen in place of a radio dial. We got one station, KVFD-TV, Ft. Dodge, Iowa. Richer...
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James Reiss
Posted on April 22, 2007 at 11:16 AM | Permalink
Review of Turn TV Off April 23-29, Please!
Paul Sullivan's commentary about National TV Turn-Off Week hit me hard. Sullivan is right on target when he claims that back in the 1950s, during the so-called Golden Age of TV, we were delighted to watch "Captain Video" in glorious black and white. Back then cars cost nine C-notes, the minimum wage was thirty cents an hour, and a mid-priced house could be purchased for seven thousand bucks. We were a lean and hungry nation after WWII, happy as hogs if our TV antennae's range reached to a neighboring city, say, Ames, Iowa.
Nowadays, as Sullivan attests, TV is ubiquitous: in day care centers, airports, and in living rooms whose flickering rainbow pixels from the tube reach from Iowa to Hawaii and Hyannis Port. The result has been a nation of fatty-poo couch potatoes addicted to Katie Couric and Jay Leno.
The solution according to Sullivan is April 23-29, National TV Turn-Off Week. Smell the coffee, sniff the spring roses, say bye-bye to the "Today" and "Tonight Shows," and everything in between.
As the owner of a 1960s Zenith color TV given to me by a poet friend whose father overhauled it before he passed away in 1990, I'm glad to say I don't subscribe to cable TV. I don't watch the box except once a day for half an hour of evening news; as a writer, I need to see mobile visual images, be they ever so snowy, on the one UHF channel my rabbit ears capture. Otherwise, I find TV as boring as watching clothes spin in a washing machine. I never made it through an episode of "Seinfeld." I go along with Nancy Reagan and "just say no" to "American Idol" and other assorted idiot box pastimes. In 1961 Newton Minnow was spot on when he described TV as "a vast wasteland."
Sorry, friends, I prefer to read, mainly novels: Richard Ford's "The Lay of the Land," Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," Paul Auster's "Travels in the Scriptorium." Or else you'll find me listening to public radio.
Paul Sullivan can bet on it: my old hulk of a boob tube will be turned off this week!