Stay Tuned

Watching television a singular experience: whatever strands of meaning I extract from the boob tube, whatever arouses my intellect in that desert of the un-real, matters only to me. To defend one’s television habits would be to defend masturbation – only one person derives any pleasure from either activity.

Only in the rarest of circumstances can that pleasure be shared between two, let alone a group. Circle jerks are one thing (as we wait for the juveniles amongst us to fish their minds out of the sewage canal), but I’m referring to the glorious feeling of being entertained.

Throughout human history and in times of extreme boredom, we have searched for ways to shatter that suffocation – the silver screen, the jester, the chamber quartet, the busker. Each medium opens our eyes, minds and hearts to the realm of possibility. In essence, that is what entertainment is – a deluge that bends and buckles the boundaries that dictate our belief structure.

And yet as we continually smack our foreheads at the collective oeuvre that lamely pass itself off as entertainment, we keep harping for more. Perhaps it’s our uncanny ability to be optimistic – somewhere underneath the crap polluting the airwaves, the musical equivalent of the legendary white whale must be swimming around. If we Tivo every legal and illegal satellite feed available, surely some sparkling allotropic show will emerge from the rough.

Those politically astute cynics in the crowd may counter with a theme that has been rehashed in newspapers, theses and drunken discussions: all the entertainment one ever needs lie in the sorry state of worldly affairs. I agree that the majority of slop deemed newsworthy is barely worthy of that moniker, but that requires its own critique.

Nonetheless, we are a strange species – we suffer without our daily fix, relying on the manic imagination of strangers to suppress the last vestiges of our insanity. Consider a world without it – if the rights to that concept haven’t already been sold and pre-production started…