There are actually only two things you can do to distract an addict from their televisions and just prey to God you don’t do them! Well what are these two ‘Sins’ of which I speak? Standing in front of the screen and touching the remote control. Quite trivial things you may think, but if you dare to commit either one of these crimes against television you will receive the same response. You’ll be hit instantaneously with a tidal wave of foul language and violent gestures. It’s a totally primal response, it as if evolution never took place. If being the one eyed man in the world of the blind makes you king, having the remote in the land of television makes you the Emperor of all the channels before you. When you become invested you’ll have the pleasure of wading through an ocean of channels, unfortunately filled with programmes that are simply not worth watching.
This device known as television has no value, function, or benefit what so ever, except maybe for the starvation of creativity and imagination along with the death of family values. Years ago, before this cancer infected our society, the Childs mind were an amazing place, a blank canvas to imagination. Children used to read books or listen to the radio; these would feed their imaginations and sense of adventure, something television can never do. Books and radio took you away to distant lands with pirates, dragons, wizards and allsorts of wonderful characters. Children also used to play outside, exercise and have fun, but if you were to ask a child of the television generation if they want to play outside what would your answer be? “ I’m watchin` tele!” The parents of these ‘slaves to television’ do not seem to mind that their children’s imaginations have been murdered by it, just as long as it keeps little Timmy quiet for a few hours longer. However this short-term solution has more than a few disastrous long-term effects. They start by copying whatever they’ve just seen, to your utter bewilderment. They jump around the living room like Jackie Chan, kicking lumps out of the cat and their younger siblings, because they saw it on a television programme. Then if that wasn’t bad enough, they begin hassling you (NON-STOP) for the latest Action Man or Barbie Doll, which they saw on an advert conveniently located between their favourite show. Television has become the new ‘Drug’ to pacify the children of Generation X, but are we going to be made to pay for the side effects of our addiction?
This plague that is television doesn’t end, not even on the odd occasion that a viewer may decide to turn off their television set, this incurable disease has become inescapable.
Television stars and their programmes are all around us they pollute magazines, they infect billboards and they have even managed to reach The Houses Parliament with their Poison. I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the day that “Free Deirdre Rashid” actually became a topic for conversation in Prime Ministers Question Time!! (What, as a nation, has become of us if we can allow this to happen?). Although television may have taken up an almost religious significance in modern day life, one day the world may see television for what it really is. The ‘enemy’ with in. The ‘corrupter’ in every home. No Divine invention is this television, but a tool of Satan! So it is in hurried closing I say “Heed my words. Any contraption that’s name is half Greek and Latin can never be trusted!”
I’m deeply sorry that I have to end this in such an accelerated fashion, but if I don’t finish soon I fear I will miss the start of Eastenders.