The statistics are pretty appalling. According to David Burke, co-author of Get A Life!, a new book published to coincide with "TV Turn-Off Week" (From April 22nd-28th), we watch on average four hours of television a day, which is 24 hours a week, or 52 days a year. Ten years of our lives.
"People in the television industry would say that you are adding something to your life, citing so-called educational TV, the experience of being in a rain forest, whatever. I would say the opposite. That there are only 24 hours in the day and what's happening is you are actually losing experiences, not gaining them."
TV Turn-Off Week was initiated in the US in 1996. Last year, 25,000 schools there took part, persuading children to see what they could achieve if they didn't watch television. This year, the campaign has crossed the Atlantic. For many people, Burke contends, TV has become an addiction. "If you look at the behaviour of TV viewers they fit the criteria of addicts of any kind: a predictable source of enjoyment that the person comes to depend on, particularly because it's dependable, and they become less able to deal with a life outside of that. Look what has television done, it has broken up the family meal completely. It has also institutionalised a way of living. It's just assumed now that people have a right to come up and shout at you. Because television shouts at you all the time."
David Burke is American, although he has lived in Britain for eight years and is the British editor of White Dot, an anti-TV quarterly magazine. While he agrees that British and Irish television is generally of a higher quality than American TV, this makes no real difference, he says. "Every country has this myth about why they're immune to television. Over here it is this: `I watch the best TV in the world. And I'm watching it with ironic detachment.' But it's all a myth. At the end of the day, you're just sitting around and getting your head played with."
The problem with the TV addict, like any other addict, is that nothing can be done until the addiction is admitted. Get A Life! bristles with TV horror stories (half the facts and figures come from Britain, the other half from Chicago, where the movement started and where Burke was at university with his co-author Jean Lotus). Sections concerning children and advertising are particularly unnerving. Written in bite-sized chunks and illustrated with cartoons, Burke hopes the book will attract all ages and reinforce the message that giving up on TV doesn't mean giving up on fun. Unlike smoking or alcohol, there is as yet no medical proof that watching television is a serious health hazard to adults, even though the growing problem of obesity is related to the decreasing amount of exercise couch potatoes take. Children are a different matter, however.
"Stick a child under two in front of a TV and that child will be language-delayed. And the fact that Teletubbies is aimed at that age group is simply shocking. It's a betrayal. The definition of education is to give someone the tools they need to go out in the world and be themselves; to make them self-sufficient and teach them what their own efforts can achieve. And it seems to me that's everything television is against." Far from stimulating children, he contends, television turns them into blotting paper. "We are killing their imagination. And imagination is what drives our society."
Studies cited in Get A Life! show that while people believe watching TV relaxes them, it does the opposite. Reading, however, provides a real escape, the book suggests. "The activity of reading is a little dance that you do with the author. You're engaged. You're actively engaged in reading, transforming words into ideas, into images. The part you play in watching television is half way to being dead." In prisons, Burke points out, television is no longer seen as a reward for good-behaviour, but is used to keep prisoners quiet.
However, the worst aspect of television, he contends, is the subliminal message that your own life is boring. "How much better, it's telling you, to watch fun, hip, groovy people trading one-liners and being daring and exciting. "As people become more and more isolated with just their televisions for company, they're less and less and less willing to create that kind of life for themselves. Yet they crave human interaction, they crave stories, so they watch more and more soap operas. The equation we have in the book is that TV sells back to you what it took away in the first place. Take Cheers, EastEnders, Neighbours, Friends. You don't see a bunch of people sitting around watching television. You see them getting together, having a laugh, having a drink, making sense of their relationships."
White Dot campaign email: whitedot@mistral.co.uk Get A Life! is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99 in the UK.