Why I Don't Watch TV

(I used to have a website – no-one read that either. Ah the freedom of anonymity! This was on there and written in about 2003 or so)

I don't watch TV. I do watch DVD's on a television and I watch box sets of certain TV series, but I don't watch broadcast television. You can use a television set to watch DVD's if you have the aerial unplugged and any receivers de-tuned so nothing happens if you press the channel buttons. I don't even sneak a peek at home. I watch zero hours of television programming every week. How did this happen?

Every spring here in the UK, the BBC sends out its demand that you pay your Licence Fee for the coming year. The world-famous BBC is not financed by the Government-controlled taxes: it's financed by a tax on watching television called the Television Licence. This name is confusing, because it sounds as if it's a licence to own or operate a TV set, but it is not. It's a licence to watch so-called "terrestrial" television. In 1998 I got my demand through the post - for £105. I am a professional pricing guy, I know all about margins, volume vs profit payoff and above all about what retailers call 'price points'. One 'price point' is a number above which you'll say "Damn that's expensive" and another is the price at which you'll think it "My heavens, that's cheap". Price points are about people's tastes, perceptions and backgrounds. But no matter who you are or what you're paid, £100 is a price point ($100 in the USA - in the UK all prices are 35% higher than they should be while all net salaries are 15% lower than they should be). Seeing that £105 I paused and asked: "What am I getting, exactly?"

So now I need to tell you about an evening which I remember to this day. I must have been tired: long day at work and all that. So I took a bath, cooked dinner and ate it while watching the 7:00 pm news on Channel Four. (Channel Four at the time had sexy presenters who now all have jobs in the USA with CNN and Sky. I'm shallow like that.) Then I flipped over to The Bill (please, don't ask: I am going to discuss US vs UK cop shows in a minute). Then I flipped over to Two Fat Ladies (a cooking show). And suddenly it was 9:00 pm, time for more news and just what had happened to my evening?

The memory of that evening joined my professional irritation at how anyone could charge £105 for anything. So what was I getting for my Licence Fee?. Here's the answer: E.R., N.Y.P.D. Blue, Homicide - Life On The Street and This Life. When I got around to watching them. I loved This Life but I had to stop watching it: at the end of each episode I'd want to have a drink and light a cigarette and pretend I was in my mid-twenties again. Three shows I wanted to watch but didn't always get around to, and one I had to stop watching for the sake of my health? Plus the possibility of wasting evenings in the manner I just described? For £105? No thank you.

So I called the TV Licence people and explained that I did not want to watch television, but did want to watch videos (this was before DVD's) and what could I do? They said: unplug the aerial and de-tune anything that can receive a signal and you will be within the law. Of course they send me reminders every year to make sure I declare I have not re-connected the aerial, but that's officials for you. So I did and I've been a happy bunny ever since.

Is that all? I'm just cheap? Well, for one thing, I belong to a socio-economic group (post-graduate single men over 35 in professional-type jobs) that doesn't watch much TV anyway. We tend to watch the news, business programs and maybe some science and technology stuff (plus one soap and a cop show we are not going to own up to). We still have the idea that, if you're watching television, there's something better you could be doing - like, maybe, sleeping. No, it was something else. Take a look at that list again.

When that £105 made me think about it, I wondered why all the shows were from the US. I realised that English television had poor production values, dull photography and set design, was smug, tidy, trivial and unimaginative. The soaps are either about a working class that simply does not exist (Coronation Street, Eastenders, Brookside) or were pale copies of Dawson's Creek (Hollyoaks). English TV comedies are based on the idea that people are funny (because pretentious, bossy, pathetic, etc) whereas I prefer comedies based on the idea that jokes are funny (even Yes Minister which had a first-rate script, depended on the caste-based parodies that were Sir Humphrey and The Minister). The police dramas, oh please! Inspector Morse aside, do I have to make out a case for the poverty of UK police programmes? Is it even sensible to mention The Bill, Heartland, Cracker in the same sentence as The Shield, NYPD Blue, Homicide - Life on The Street, Hill Street Blues and others?

The difference between what the US studios and budgets could do and what the poor old Brits could do was simply too great. There is simply no way that a UK film or television company will ever rise to the standard of The West Wing: it doesn't have the money. There are British directors who make good films, but they do so in Hollywood, not on British television or for British production companies (exception: Working Title) And when the Yanks come over here and touch British subjects, something happens and everything they know about making good films falls out the back of their heads: I say no more than to ask how they could make Veronica Guerin? Yes I know that the US turns out a vast amount of low-budget rubbish: both industries can dredge the bottom, my point is that the heights are now well above the BBC's budget.

And that's why I dumped the licence: because UK television was cookery programs, costume dramas, "hard-hitting" dramas about the English Underclass. Now I have shelves full of DVD box sets. It might cost more per year than the Licence Fee, but I don't get that frustrated feeling everyone gets when they go looking for entertainment or information on the television and find instead that "there's never anything on". The evening doesn't go by while I'm slumped on the couch watching a programme made because it has a low cost-per-minute. And I get about twelve hours a week more spare time than the average bear.