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Monday, December 3, 2007

TeleFrouFrouVision

When I was growing up we only had a telly very occasionally. I remember the first time we got one - I was about 6 or 7 and when my dad finally tuned it in, Dr Who was on.

That telly met a rather gruesome end. My brother and I fought over what to watch with alarming regularity and one day, after having had it up to here, my dad cut the plug off. My mother swears that we didn't really worry about not having a telly after a few days of withdrawal. I have vague memories of wondering what kids were talking about at times in school but I can't remember being particularly bothered.

I think the next time we had a TV was when I was about 11. Dad tuned it in time for us to watch a telethon.

The town we lived in was tiny - about 300 people - so we also didn't have a movie theatre. My parents were, and still are, technology shy, so we didn't even have a VCR. Radio reception was so patchy that it only paid to listen at night and then we could only listen to crackly American stations.

Needless to say, growing up in such isolation, now I have gaps in my cultural lexicon but I think that's all I missed out on.

As an adult, I have a love/hate relationship with television. I very rarely watch anything over 30 minutes without doing something else at the same time. What I do watch tends to be utter, utter crap.

Just recently, I've considered being more disciplined with my telly watching, like only turning it on when there is something I would really like to watch (here's looking at you Flight of the Conchords). And now the decision has been taken out of my hands; our telly is broken.

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