Next week is TV turnoff week in the US. We don’t yet have such a problem and have actually cut back to just one telly (a reduction of 50%!).
By complete coincidence, BBC Radio DJ Steve Lamacq today was asking on his afternoon show on 6Music about Draconian or unreasonable rules imposed by your parents when you were young. It quickly became apparent that ITV (the UK’s first commerical TV channel) was effectively banned in many listeners’s households, including one person whose parents went to the lengths of removing the channel-changing knob (it was the 70s) so they couldn’t re-tune their TV.
Anyway, I decided to send in the story of the lengths my Dad went to to prevent Charlotte and I from watching TV (not just ITV, although that was seriously frowned upon at all times – and with good reason, let’s face it!). To wit:
When my sister and I were growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were also prevented from watching ITV by and large. It was deemed inferior to the BBC and let’s face it, they were right!
In fact my Dad sometimes took it one step further and went as far as splitting the electric cord on the TV such that he could take the business end (the bit that plugged into the wall) back to work with him at lunchtime so that when we got home from school (my Mum worked part time and so wasn’t there a couple of afternoons a week) we couldn’t watch any telly until he got home at about 5.30!
So we listened to the radio instead.
Still I didn’t really miss much in terms of telly, apart from the odd Grange Hill and if I was as handy with a screwdriver, I might try the same thing on my kids now!
And you know what? He read it out on the show.