This is how much I hate TV

Craig and I have not owned a TV in the whole time we've been married, which is over eight years. We've been perfectly content with this arrangement but have discussed the possibility of getting one once we have a few little Georgies running around. Rationale being that they're going to be considered weird enough for their oddball Christianity anyway, not having a TV will just compound things. And although sticking out a bit won't do them any harm, getting teased or even beaten up in the playground for reasons they're not old or mature enough to appreciate is not going to help them develop a strong faith in God.

The longer I go without TV, the less I miss it. Actually, that's a misleading statement; it makes it sound like once upon a time I missed TV. I have never missed TV. But I now have a very strong aversion to it. So getting a TV for the sake of the kids would be a sacrifice on my part. And we have not actually decided yet whether to get one, it's just a scenario we have contemplated.

So, why do I hate TV so much? For its shallowness, emptiness, time and space wasting, brain cell consuming all-out wrongness. I'm sorry. I acknowledge that every now and then there is a show on TV that's not so incredibly worthless. But worthlessness is relative. There is not one single show on TV that actually enriches my life. For example, nature programs are nice and show me the wonders of God's creation, but of course they always attribute the most incredible design features of various animals and plants to evolution. As another example, travel shows may show me some lovely places to go visit, but they always assume I have a) the time and b) the money to spend on exotic "weekend getaways" to Port Douglas, Broome or Vanuatu. Reality shows are shocking; under the guise of allowing us to see real people in supposedly real situations, we are able to get our jollies watching them argue, get mad, get revenge, scheme, bitch at each other, be humiliated by the judges, do personally degrading things for the sake of money and short-lived fame (bet you can't remember season 2003's winner of Big Brother, can you?), etc. The news is mostly unimportant and forgettable - I challenge you to recall more than three stories from whatever was on last night - and what is important you can hear in five minutes on the radio or read about in the paper (I venture to say all commercial stations would rather focus on the rescue mission for the kitten stuck up the tree in the next suburb than on the fact that the president of Iran is openly calling for the destruction of a nearby nation of people whose race and religion are different from his own). And don't even get me started on the ads.

This tirade has been brought on by an observation I made of my 8-year-old nephew on Monday. I have an arrangement with my brother at the moment whereby I baby-sit his kids for a few hours in the afternoon every second week. My nephew likes to watch TV when he gets home from school. That's OK. Most kids do. But here is his routine: Get home, dump school bag on floor in dining room when his bedroom is another ten steps away (although he's learning not to do that around me anymore), eat some junk-food snack, ask me if he can have some other junk-food snack, shoot a few hoops on his miniature basketball set, plonk himself down on the floor in the lounge room and switch on the TV. He watches Hi-5 (yes, Hi-5, yes, he is 8 years old, yes, it appears he would rather watch the most sickeningly cheesy pre-school singing-and-dancing act ever to grace the planet than not watch anything at all), followed by cartoons on Boomerang, which is one of the approximately twelve thousand kids' networks available on my brother's cable TV service. The cartoons consist of aggressive, smart-alec, ridiculous characters with loud, grating voices who run around getting into conflicts with each other and/or saying absolute inane rubbish. Here's the ad for Ed, Edd and Eddy: "I'm just a monster in a boy's body... Hey, give me back my eyebrow, I can't make funny faces without it... Always write your name on your underwear" (which he then pulls out of his pants to demonstrate). Or, once those stupid shows are over, we get good ol' Looney Toons. Yep, they're still going. Coyote is still trying to eat Roadrunner and getting blown up every minute, Sylvester is still trying to eat Tweety and suffering the same. It is approximately two hours of blaring, repetitive crap peppered with ads for more crap which the kids can delight in watching later. And here's the bit that irks me the most: my nephew is not really even watching this stuff. I have observed him. He sits in front of the TV, doesn't laugh at anything that's supposed to be funny, has a glazed look in his eye, and in fact doesn't even appear to move, but obviously has just enough awareness of his surroundings to react unfavourably if the TV is switched off while he's momentarily staring at the carpet.

Now don't get me wrong. My nephew is not a bad kid. We don't know each other very well, but I have noticed that he's willing to talk to me a little bit more each time I baby-sit. Yesterday he even told me, before he was out the front door, that he was going to his friend's place down the street (yes, it has taken some time but we've finally got to the point of him telling me where he is going before he actually goes. Maybe one day he'll even ask for permission first.) But when it comes to TV, he is a zombie. I fear how much that box is draining away his capacity for intelligence, creativity and critical thinking. Luckily the other love of his life appears to be basketball, not Nintendo, so at least he's getting exercise. But man! What a shocking waste of his childhood that TV is.

And so I think, do I really want to allow my Georgies to fall so easily into that trap? Of course not - I don't think any parent does. There are measures I can take as a responsible adult to ensure that my kids do not become TV addicted automatons. But it's not easy, as the evidence shows - I think most parents simply give up trying to control their kids viewing habits when the TV is such a pervasive, powerful and addictive piece of equipment. So why would I weaken myself deliberately by getting one "for the sake of the kids"? After all, let's face it - the shows that the kids watch and talk about at school the next day, thus demonstrating their TV ownership or lack thereof to the world, are some of the worst which I simply would not let my kids watch anyway.

Craig said that when he was growing up, for a while at least, the only TV his family had was kept in his parents' bedroom. And while their bedroom was not explicitly off-limits, he never felt OK to just waltz in there and turn on the telly. He said he tried it once, and his mum asked him what he was doing with a puzzled expression. This arrangement was very effective in curbing the kids' TV diet, and is one we could consider trying ourselves when we've got our own.

But no. For one thing, our bedroom is too small to fit a TV. For another, I hate TV. I could not abide having one in the same room I sleep in.

So the jury's still out for the moment. At this point, however, I'm leaning away from it.