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TV is good for children
People who feel smug about not switching on are wrong.
In Afghanistan the Islamic fundamentalist Taleban have been hanging televisions in public, stringing them up as a mark of moral disgust and to put an end to the evil that they do - or so one report said last week. It is certainly true that the Taleban have now banned television and television sets in the areas over which they have control.
How one sympathises, if only for a second. It feels distinctly odd to experience even a moment's affinity with a fundamentalist peasant dictatorship, but I do share their hatred of the box, as far as my children are concerned at least. They are addicted to television. They will watch almost anything.
There are no two ways about it. I have failed to keep the infernal machine under control, and they watch it far too much, though they watch less than most children. The result is that they have much less time for violent exercise and creative play and developing social skills or whatever they ought to be doing in a well regulated household. Their personalities are being doped into passivity and isolation simply by watching. Meanwhile their imaginations are being undermined and their moral attitudes formed by low-grade cartoons, sensational confessionals and didactic soap operas.
That is the alarmist view and that's what I think, at least half of the time, when I have time to think about it at all. I do constantly feel tempted to ban the television, if not quite to string it up. Sometimes I threaten to silence it by cutting off the cable service. Sometimes I actually do, for a month or so. The scientific evidence on the effects of watching television is confused and confusing, and not very scientific either, but intuitively it is obvious that watching a great deal of television is likely to affect the development of the brain - most intense experiences in childhood do. Intuitively it is obvious that many programmes are unhealthily violent or profoundly stupid. Intuitively it is obvious that there are better things to do. Even playing computer games is more constructive.
All the same, I always let the box back in to our lives again, sooner or later. However vulgar and offensive most television may be to educated middle-class tastes, there are always a few very good programmes. There are even one or two that we watch together, like The Simpsons, with commendable family solidarity. And as for the bad ones, which predominate, the question is whether they really do very much harm. I think there's probably even something to be said in favour of them, however much they infuriate me; my children are much better informed in many ways than we were at their age. They are much more streetwise, and they need to be. They have a much stronger sense of popular culture and of how other people live; in this sense the barriers between social classes have become less impenetrable, and between races too.
Children today also have a much greater psychological understanding of adults than we did, which I assume comes from watching a ceaseless stream of adults parading their problems in lurid detail on almost every channel: in my childhood adults were inscrutable aliens, who weren't even frightened of the dark. Seeing adults more realistically may make children more anxious, but I think it also makes them wiser and more independent, and less easy to manipulate. One of the abused children of Fred and Rosemary West said that it wasn't until the household got a television, quite late in her childhood, that she realised there was anything abnormal about what was happening to her.
I think I would go further and admit that it is a handicap not to watch television. To be cut off from television is to be cut off from contemporary life - presumably that's what the Taleban have in mind, and what I quite often have in mind myself. Cut off from contemporary life is what I all too often want to be, especially in the comfort of my own home. However it is a disadvantage. I know, because I hardly ever watch television myself, largely because I don't have time, and very often I realise I don't have much feel for things I would actually like to understand.
For instance I have no television images whatsoever of the Vietnam war, though I read about it constantly. In retrospect I realise that I didn't perceive the war, or feel about it, as most of my contemporaries did. This is because I didn't get any of the emotional messages that television conveys about everything it turns its heartless eye upon. There are things about current affairs and contemporary life that only television can show. But there are some people who actually feel smug about not watching television. They are wrong, especially the journalists among them.
In any case, those who think most television is pretty dreadful, those who think the growth of the free market in television is making it even worse, and those who seek to restrain it, ought to remember that vulgarity is a large part of the price of freedom. After all, vulgarity is only a word for what the masses like, and vulgarity is (by definition) what they will choose if they are free to, in television just as much as anything else. That's life, and that's certainly democracy. Would anyone prefer the Taleban?
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 12, 1998
