Nearly two years ago now we let the subscription on our cable TV lapse, and haven’t bothered to renew it since. In this age of DVD season sets, 24-hour streaming internet news and just plain frustration with the rubbish value for money that local cable bouquets offer, it made no sense to continue. Nowadays when I go to a friend’s place and see the TV on -- inevitably tuned to some flavour of news -- it feels like some kind of alien world. The last time I was on vacation in India I tried to spend some time flipping channels, seeing if I could recapture those feelings of discovery and entertainment that TV provided for a long time in my life, but it ended with me bored and angry, two hours later having not stayed on a channel for more than five seconds.
Strange things have happened since then. I find that the large chunk of space in my brain that used to be reserved for TV is shrinking. I remember TV, but not as well as I used to, and in a few years time I may not remember much of it at all. Hence this post, which is an infodump; a big steaming brick about TV and the way it was when I used to watch it. Because, though I loathe the way it is now, a lot of me has been shaped by TV, by that first viewing of Star Trek when was an infant, by entertainments factual and imaginary, by the rush of information and colour and sound.
TV was the internet of its time. And this is how I saw it.
