A Small Plastic Box
I've always been fascinated by television. As a student I refused to have one, because I was told it was an nasty thing by my friends, who all had television sets, and therefore spoke from experience. I knew it was nasty, but every time I saw a television set, I couldn't help wondering about all those small little figures that moved around in the little plastic box. Now, when I've grown up and have a telly on my own, a growing number of questions arise.
1. How does the sound get out?
All those people speak behind a glass surface, and yet it sounds like they are in my living room. It's as if they were screaming all the time. In fact they are in most programs, come to think of it, so that explains it.
2. How come all this works in a box of plastic?
I've read Darwin. No, I haven't, but I've read about him. He was a man who sailed around the world to explain why the plants of his own garden looked like they did. His wife claimed it was because he didn't water them enough, but he put together a ridiculous pretext and called it "evolution". Since then nature hasn't evolved a bit, so one could ask oneself what the fuzz was about. Well, ask his wife!
Evolution, and thereby life, thrives where there is plenty of sun and water. A plastic box is not full of sun and water. I would have been able to understand television much better, if the box had been of wood and if one had been supposed to have it on a plate so water wouldn't run down on the carpet. That's not the case. Watering a television set does not make the picture clearer (I've tried), and sunshine makes it almost impossible to see the picture.
3. Why do people always hit each other on television?
In school we learn to be nice to each other. Either they have different kinds of schools for the small people in the telly boxes, or they go to some advanced courses I didn't qualify for, where they learn to be nasty. On the other hand, the old Romans liked watching gladiators killing their best friends, and if an old cultural people enjoyed seeing people mincing each other, I suppose we should be proud, that we do the same thing today.
There are plenty of other questions of different degrees of interest like: "Why do they spend 95% of their time saying what we'll see, if we happen to find the last 5%?" "What's the underlying message in a competition, where people, who can name more than two European countries, win a fridge?" "When the remote control doesn't work any longer, how do I switch it off? How do I switch the damn' thing off? Help! Help! How do I switch it off?"
But those questions are among the eternal ones we likely won't ever get any answer to.
20 July 1998