Reality/TV

My partner, her 10 year old son and I were having one of those morning-cup-of-tea-in-bed type wandering conversations about how our TV watching was policed when we were kids and how much harder it is now to do that. We wondered if, indeed, there was a point to policing TV (but then, last night's family viewing was Tim Minchin's Ready For This) or was the policing of TV in our youth similar to how early motor cars couldn't be driven without a man with a red flag walking in front to warn people.

The boys in this house are more aware of certain - mostly sport-related - aspects of the world than we were as kids. Which is great. The down side of all this TV razzamatazz however is that often the real world fails to live up to the TV experience. Compare sitting way up the back of the crowd at a major basketball game with the coverage on the TV. Sure, there's atmosphere, but many folks - and young boys in particular - often prefer the autistic feast of stats paraded across the screen to the ambience of the stadium.

This made me think of those nature documentaries with David Attenborough and the like that the BBC used to make back when it wasn't crap. We swam with whales, flew with geese and buzzed through fields of flowers with bees. Nature made the stuff of spectacle. So awesome was the footage that real contact with nature - simply going out into your back yard and listening to a blackbird - seems utterly pointless. Lame as, bro. Reality just isn't as interesting as TV even though TV doesn't give you anything like the sensory richness of the real world. I held forth on this subject briefly. My partner's son nodded wisely:

"That's why we need 3D TV."

Not in my back yard

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