Idiot box

I hate television. When I lived in Spain we didn't have one for a long while and I missed it powerfully, though we were lucky enough to have a fantastic arthouse cinema in our very street which showed version original (ie, not dubbed) foreign language movies. I saw a lot of films.

Then we got a TV, without benefit of satellite, showing only Spanish or Catalan channels, which are stuck in the seventies. Gameshows. Chatshows. Very, very, dull political programmes. Some of our friends used to get people to tape the soaps and send them out.

(Though I would rather stick pins in my eyes than sit through a soap. For me they're a claustrophobic, never-ending nightmare. Look at the features of the gothic novel. Endless grimness? No possibility of escape? Sub-plots involving incest? Liminal creatures, between two states - eg dead/living, human/animal? Death, disease, destruction? If Edgar Allen Poe was writing today he'd be an Eastenders script-writer. Except he could really write. )

When I moved back to London, I watched TV all the time. But something seemed to have happened in the two years I was gone, there seemed to be a lot of shows with the lowest common denominator. They had cheap production values, they seemed to thrive on taking ordinary people and making them look like arses. More and more you saw "reality" shows taking over where once there were dramas or documentaries or comedies. The cruder, the cheaper, the nastier, the better. Couldn't tell if it was just a reflection of what was going on in general in the UK or was just a cost-cutting exercise. Whatever, it had suddenly shown a really ugly streak.

So I've fallen out of love with the TV, now an evening of watching it makes me feel down. And Sar, before you pop up in the comments to point out we spent a Saturday evening glued to the box, that was a FILM, it's different.

What do you watch?