kill my television

I forgot that, with no roof arial, the cable box was our only source of actually receiving telly. Annoyingly enough, last night was the first night in ages that I wanted to see something – my friend’s mum was an extra on The Friday Night Project – but I’m too elated by the no-telly freedom to be all that bothered. Whoo!

Yay. One down. Today, a colleague informed me that if I wanted to listen to the White Stripes podcast I missed the previous day, I just had to press red on my digital TV remote. I was able to truthfully answer him that we don’t have digital, don’t watch telly, and that shortly wouldn’t have it at all. His puzzled face was a picture, and another colleague said, “My God! What do you do? I couldn’t live without a telly. It’s all I do of an evening. If I didn’t have a telly, I’d have to talk to my partner.”

I think that says it all.

_{What she said is, of course, not true. My own partner is right next to me. We are in companiable silence, and he is on his own computer.}

..but I assume it has. I cancelled the TV licence direct debit the other day too. While technically we are covered for the month of June, as it’s been paid for, I also wrote to the licencing people to let them know of my intentions. This means that they could very well turn up unannounced, in disbelief that anyone in this day and age could possibly live without a telly, to check that we are actually doing so. So the ariel and anything conducting live programmes needs to be disconnected from our telly pretty damn sharpish. I think I will turn this over to my resident technical support specialist, seeing as I barely even know how to turn the damn thing on.

Our cable goes off on Monday.

Time to cancel the direct debit.

The other day, Headapollo came home with a radical and rather smashing suggestion. The top-notch stereo is currently in the study, but we tend to listen to music more in the living room and the kitchen, meaning we use either the DVD player or one of the crappy little CD players that scandalised him so with their rubbish quality when he first arrived.

So the man suggests that it would make sense to put the decent stereo in the living room, shift the telly and cinema seats to the spare room and make a little home cinema with my fantastic cinema seats. We can then also move his rather splendid cream recliner chair to the living room – something for which I’ve been petitioning for months anyway. Then by a staggering coincidence another friend offers us a rather nice piece of furniture that would hold the stereo admirably. We don’t have it yet because he hasn’t yet bought his own replacement, but he’s on a promise.

Of course, this means getting rid of all the crap in the spare room, but now that we have an actual purpose planned for that room other than holding crap, I hope to be more motivated towards it. I also know that once I start my business I will need a separate, more private workspace – and probably a separate computer – away from my “fun” computer.

When I think back to the days and nights and weeks and years I spent slumped in front of it, they don’t even seem real. It’s as if they happened to someone else and, in a way, they did. Now the idea of spending hours in front of it, filling my mind with irrelevant information that I didn’t actually ask for, is completely alien to me. Why the hell did I do that? And how did I find time for it? By doing nothing else, that’s how, and there’s the difference. These days, I watch barely any television at all – it takes something really really special to make me switch on. At the moment, the only time the TV is on is on a Friday night for Peep Show and Derren Brown’s Trick or Treat, and Jools Holland if there’s anyone on worth watching.

Not watching TV has made a mammoth difference to the quality of my life. I have time for activities I never could have fitted in before. I exercise. I study. I read. I write. I think. I work on my goals. I have lots of quality talk/cuddle time with my fella without our eyes constantly being drawn and our minds distracted by the glowing box in the corner. The power of the damn thing is incredible – it was on the other night, buzzing away quietly after he’d finished watching a DVD, and although we were casually talking, weren’t actively watching or interested in what was on, and I was busy cleaning my teeth, we were both standing frozen in its glare, trailing off mid… sentence, and unable to get away just in case something interesting happened. It didn’t. A TV-less life has also altered my frame of information. This was brought home to me the other day when I saw the cover of Heat magazine and a headline akin to “New Big Brother House Pics!” Just a year ago that would have caused palpitations, but this year it brought on nothing but a wry and rather thankful smile. I don’t care about Big Brother. I don’t know who’s doing what or who in Eastenders and I’m not bothered. If other people choose to care about that, that’s their prerogative. But I’m glad that I’ve freed up space in my time and my brain to care about things that can genuinely make a lasting contribution to my quality of life and well being. It’s refreshing, also, to not be constantly informed about and coerced to buy products that I don’t need. Whereas before, I would spend a lot of time thinking about things I’d like to buy, I’ve now removed myself, to a large extent, from the cycle, and the only time I get the shopping-crave is when I’m actually at the shops and surrounded by goodies. Interestingly, being less informed about the products has made me less inclined to buy them and guess what? My life is just as fulfilled without them. I’m spending a lot less money, too. And while we’re on the subject, unless you’re watching plenty, TV is really poor value for money. At the moment our cable TV is about a tenner a month, and the TV licence is about £12 – £22 a month, all in all. If we watch two hours each a week – and that is an extremely generous estimate – that works out (if my dodgy maths is right) at an hourly cost of £1.37. Not great.

Not watching TV has had wider-reaching social consequences, too, and not all positive. It is a little bit strange to be unable to join in the 50% of conversations at work that are made up of what was on telly the night before. I’m out of the loop fashion-wise, cos now I don’t read TV/celebrity/women’s magazines like Heat I no longer get to see who’s wearing what but, as hacky as it sounds, I think the payoff in not constantly being bombarded by images of unattainable beauty and thinness has actually been beneficial to my spiritual health – though when I go out anywhere trendy I’m now painfully aware of how dated I look, and that’s not fun. As I’m not really a radio listener either, I have no clue what’s going on in the world of music. But all these changes not watching TV have made to my life have just made me more aware of how much of a default channel of information it has become, both information we want and information we don’t, and this just makes me want to buck against it even more.

So the decision and the phone call have both been made. On Monday I gave the cable company their marching orders, and as of June 20th (ish) we will no longer have cable TV. The way they desperately tried to cling onto my custom was quite hilarious. They asked why I wanted to cancel, and I told them we don’t watch TV, so they tried to tempt us back by offering us 138 free channels. Then 37 free channels. Way to go, brain-o-boy. I don’t think they’re trained in what to do if someone wants to leave TV completely. And then at some point in the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing to the TV licensing people, explaining that as of that date we’ll be disconnecting the ariel and no longer be using the TV to receive programmes as they’re being broadcast – which seems to be the criteria for not needing a licence – and cancelling the TV licence direct debit. We’ll keep the TV itself, for DVDs, but it will not be a conduit for broadcast telly. Interestingly, the licencing laws don’t yet seem to include downloading programmes from the internet, even though Channel 4 have launched their own on-demand service. I’m not about to bring this to the attention of the licensing people.

I’ll admit I have some misgivings about pulling the plug totally. I’ve never lived in a TV-free household, and it feels rather like having the rug pulled out from under my feet. I mean, TV is like the comfort blanket fill-all activity. It’s always there if you want it. What will we do for vegging out? Well, what we do already. We have DVDs, we have music, we have books and games. I might even get him to play Scrabble with me again. Logically, I can’t see that not actually having access to streamed live telly is gonna make that much difference to our lives if we already pretty much ignore it. TV is like the unopened box in the spare room whose contents are unclear, unused and unloved, but which we keep just in case we ever need it. But we don’t need it, so in just over a month, out it goes.