Recently, I sat
next to someone at a dinner party, and after we’d finished the obligatory “So,
what do you do? Oh, you sell insurance? How interesting!”, the inevitable
silence followed in which both of us searched desperately for something to talk
about.
“What do you do on the weekends?” he
eventually asked.
I grabbed the lifeline with
gratitude. “I watch TV!”
He frowned a little and I couldn’t
help but wonder if it would be rude of me to suggest he get a little Botox.
“Oh,” he said. “I find TV such a waste of time. It’s just all trash!”
Now, I like to think of myself as a
fairly gentle person. I help little old ladies cross the road. I always stop to
admire a well-kept garden, and I never pass up the opportunity to say hello to
all the dogs I walk by. I turn the other way when I see a badly dressed person,
and I always stand up and give up my seat on the train to a pregnant woman.
But as my kindergarten teacher, Miss
Anna-Rhett Holliday, a genteel woman from South Carolina, used to say when
someone was rude to her, “Them’s fightin’ words!”
And in my books, telling me that TV
is a waste of time and that it’s all trash sure qualifies as fightin’ words.
So, of course, at that dinner party, right in the middle of the main course of damp
roast chicken and a rather tasteless bulgur salad, I bristled. At the other end
of the table, Saffy said she felt the temperature of the air drop five degrees.
“I don’t watch any TV,” the guy went
on.
“Oh?” I said icily. “What do you do
then?”
“I read. I read a lot. But I only read
non-fiction.”
“And what do you have against fiction?”
“And what do you have against fiction?”
“I don’t see the point of it. We
live in the real world, not some fantasy la-la land, so why waste time reading
about things that aren’t real?”
I smiled tightly and turned to the girl
on my left who was picking at her chicken. We talked about the Kardashians for
the rest of the evening.
Later, as we were in the cab zooming
home, it was all Saffy and I could talk about. “Oh my God, are there really
people like that out there?” my flat-mate asked. “They don’t watch TV?”
“Apparently not.”
“But why? There’s just so much good
stuff to watch!”
“Don’t tell me that,” I huffed.
If I ever committed a crime, there
wouldn’t be any need to send me to prison. To really punish me, all you would need
to do to is to take away my TV set.
Because, if it’s not already clear,
I live and die by TV.
Someone once asked me what my idea
of heaven was, and I said it would be having a massage with a TV right below
the massage bed where your head sticks into the hole.
I recently spent the entire weekend
holed up at home with a DVD box set marathon of Damages, seasons two, three and
four. And who can forget that epic week when I watched all forty-six episodes
of Maggie Q kicking butt in seasons one and two of Nikita?
Recently, Amanda said that I had to
start watching Breaking Bad, but I hesitated. “I’ve still got six seasons of
The Sopranos lined up,” I said weakly, “right next to five seasons of The Wire.
Right now, I’m in the middle of season eight of Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t think I
have a spare second left.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a
way,” Amanda said firmly. “It’s Oh My God So Good! I’m calling in sick
tomorrow, just so I can get to the end of season three!”
“I’m on season two right now, so
don’t tell me what happens!” Saffy instructed.
Saffy also thinks the solution is
for us to buy another two TV and DVD sets, line them up with our existing TV,
and play a different show on each. “That way we’ll be able to get through it
all three times as fast!”
Of course, our list of must-watch TV
just keeps growing. We recently discovered Game of Thrones, The Borgias,
Revenge and Person of Interest. We each have a little notebook in which we keep
track of what we’ve seen, but it’s all a bit like trying to catch spilling
grains of rice. It’s starting to get overwhelming.
“Think of all the great shows we’re
going to miss when we’re dead!”
Amanda said the other day.
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I know!
Really, who has time to read a book?”
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