A year or more ago I was listening to AA Gill who is, amongst other things, a television critic.
He said how fed up he was with otherwise intelligent and well-informed people saying to him ‘I never watch television. Whenever I watch it there’s never anything good on.’ I felt a squirm of self-recognition.
‘What these people are saying’, he went on, ‘is that they are opting out of the dominant medium of our age and that they would go into a library, pull a book off the shelf, and say ‘rubbish library, no good books in here’.’ Full-on squirm now. ‘You have to treat television like the cinema, theatre or books: you read reviews, solicit opinions and then record what you want to watch. The challenge is sorting out the excellent from the merely good. It takes some effort, but not that much; ten minutes a week.’
Suitably chastised, I now do as he suggested.
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