Hide the Remote and Kick your Drug Habit

Another good essay as to why television is evil.

Hide the remote and kick your drug habit

By Theodore Dalrymple

I HAVEN’T watched television since I left home in 1968. Of course, I have occasionally caught a glimpse of a screen out of the corner of my eye since then, but not such as to encourage me to rush out and buy one. For much of the 1980s, I was fortunate enough to live in countries too poor and backward to have television, and it confirmed me in my view that life was better without it.

I was therefore unmoved when I received through the post a glossy brochure portraying an entire family slouched on a sofa, the adolescent daughter glued to her mobile phone as if it were a deformity or excrescence of her own body. Inside there is a picture of dad, this time alone on the sofa, looking like the dejected husband in an Ibsen drama, his weary head propped up by his bent arm. Still, relief is at hand: “£8.50 a month’s a small price to pay for peace and quiet in the family”. Thanks to digital television, “now we never sit around moaning that there’s nothing on telly — there’s so much to watch”.

Indeed, after installation, there seems no reason why any member of the family should ever again address a word to any other member. And since family rows start with words, digital television promotes perfect domestic peace, provided only that there are enough screens in the house. On the next page, the teenage daughter is slumped on the sofa, an expression of sullen adolescent ennui on her face, her arm stretched out with the remote control in her grasp, obviously flicking from channel to channel in the hope that something will fan the dying embers of her mind. “Digital TV’s so educational,” she is saying. In what sense? She likes to watch people called J-Lo and Pink on MTV.

On the opposite page, her ten-year-old brother says: “I’m not allowed a pet — but at least I can watch loads of animal programmes!” In other words, he is not permitted experience, only vicarious experience, to prepare him no doubt for a lifetime of passive entertainment. But at least his choice showed a spark of curiosity, though digital television will soon enough extinguish it.

I BELIEVE that the number of homes with a satellite dish is proportional to the urban deprivation of the district. Where every home has a satellite dish, you may be sure that drug taking, child neglect, sexual abuse, domestic violence and every other kind of social pathology flourish. Whether watching television causes social pathology or the other way round is a very difficult question to answer. I suspect that there is a dialectical relationship. What is true of satellite television will no doubt soon be true of cable. And the efficiency with which the cables were installed was in striking contrast to the inefficiency with which other public services are often provided. By their priorities shall ye know them.

The place of television in our national life is indisputable. Puzzled parents, who ask me why their children have gone to the bad, say that they have given them everything. By everything, they mean the latest trainers and, above all, a television in their room. Yet they never connect the way their children have turned out with the entertainment they have drugged them with, the better to get on with their own lives. Television is to modern childcare what laudanum was to Victorian childcare. We, however, have fewer excuses than the Victorians.

Some time before Malcolm Muggeridge died, if not in the odour of sanctity exactly, at least in the odour of sanctimony, he railed — on the box, of course — against television, which he called one of the great evils of our time. I thought he was mad; but now, when I look at the desolation of my patients’ lives, their minds filled with cheap sensation with which slow-moving reality cannot compete, I think he was a prophet.

(Thanks Brendan)