A Rant at my TV...

Am I getting old or is the TV not as good as it was in my youth? When I turn on my box there are literally hundreds of channels, yet rarely can I find something I actually want to waste an hour of my life watching.

I don’t do soaps any more. I find Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Neighbours and Hollyoaks depressing. And as a woman who lives on the edge of east London, the least said about Eastenders the better! What a miserable, confrontational, dangerous place fictious Walford is to live. And why, in 2016, does nobody who lives there appear to own a washing machine? I once lived in a flat which was so small I could cross my living room in three paces- and even I could find space for the essential machinery to clean my clothes to avoid traipsing to the launderette. I wouldn’t know where to go nowadays to even find a launderette!

Reality TV is another thing I just don’t get. Why would I want to see Kim Kardashian having a wholly contrived argument with her mother about another nanocelebrity who nobody cares about? Nor do I want to watch pregnant sixteen year olds, real housewives from anywhere or hear about the lives of anyone from either Jersey or Geordie Shore. Those people are not real people and their noisy lives are self-indulgent. And again, as an Essex girl, I find TOWIE offensive. I can honestly say I walk around Essex on a day by day basis and have only seen one person spray tanned the colour of a Cheeto, and rather fittingly, it was a cast-member from TOWIE trying to be ‘inconspicuous’ at the local indoor shopping mall (the big pink fur hat, sunglasses and the entourage sadly gave her away).

I miss the old days, when we only had three TV channels and the programmes were more discerning. I miss sitting down at laughing as a family with the Two Ronnies or Morecombe and Wise. I miss the cracking drama serials the BBC put on every week rather than just two or three times a year. I miss the hour-long game shows which were genuinely funny and light-hearted, where the most you could hope to win was a teas-made and a cuddly toy. What happened to those? Even game shows have become cut-throat and serious. Everything is Twenty-four hours now, and the quality and content is so diluted as to be irrelevant.

But most of all I miss the silence that came every morning and afternoon when all you could see when you turned the TV on was the test card! I wish they would bring that back…