I read each new gloomy report on the cumulative effects of too much television in much the same spirit as hypochondriacs thumb through The Lancet. According to the earnest academics who research such things, someone like me, whose life has been lived in a glow of a cathode tube, should be a gibbering, illiterate, aggressive, dysfunctional amoral couch potato with an attention span only measurably in nano-seconds.
In fact, without ever once being tempted to reach for the off button, I’ve managed to swot successfully for exams, hold down a job, mark books, plan lessons, have a family, put up shelves, go for country walks, pursue rewarding hobbies and generally be the sort of good-egg that mothers urge their children to emulate.
Never once have I committed a copycat crime, or ever felt like engaging in gratuitous violence - except when Danny Baker’s on. As much as I’d like to tut-tut along with the doom-mongers, I can’t bring myself to believe that today’s yoof are going to fare any worse than I did.
Of course, if they are anything like me, they might indeed have the telly permanently on, but they don’t watch it - not in the determined way that bird watchers watch birds, or visitors to an art gallery look at paintings. The programme producers flatter themselves by calling us “viewers” - but in fact, what they and the tut-tutting academics don’t understand is that viewing only occupies a small part of the brain. Most of the grey cells are usually busily engaged with something else.
I suppose some readers might be shocked to discover that I’m writing this to the accompaniment of the final stages of Embassy World Darts Championship and simultaneously - thanks to the remote control - a programme on wine growing and a re-run of an old episode of The A-Team. How I manage this remarkable feat, I cannot tell you. All I know is that I’ve been happily combining tele watching and other activities ever since those distant black and white days when I mastered my seven times table with half an eye on Compact.
A word of warning, then, to the manufacturers currently hyping up a future in which the PC will have replaced the TV, and all programmes will be interactive. Once the novelty wears off (that is, in about half an hour) most of us committed “viewers” will be far too busy getting on with the rest of our lives to want to mess around with the mouse and keyboard. As anyone who has had the television on for as long as we have knows, nothing on the box, whether it’s delivered via an aerial, cable, telephone line or CD-Rom, is ever going to warrant our undivided attention.
I’m happy to read that at least one academic - Professor Stephen Heppell - has found that today’s children are every bit as fond of television and as laid back about it as us old hands. His tests (see left), conducted at Anglia Polytechnic University, seem to prove that 11 to 14-year-olds can, without any great effort, follow four different programmes simultaneously. Teachers, he concludes, simply aren’t exploiting the ease with which youngsters can handle the new technology. He says it would be reasonable for teachers to tell children to watch a video, talk about it with a friend, complete a worksheet and expect them “to do it all at once”.
What the modern pupil needs is a computer like Apple’s Performa 630, which has the optional attraction attraction of an in-built television tuner. The television picture (live or from video) appears in a window which can fill the screen or be squeezed into a corner so that you can watch while getting on with word processing or whatever. Equip every child with a computer like this and we can look forward to another generation of good-eggs that mums can be proud of.
