Tuesday, February 17, 2015
By Lindsay Johns for the Daily Mail
Updated: 10:11 GMT, 3 February 2012
Little did I expect to ever have anything in common with the famous Hollywood A-list actress and quintessence of English pulchritude Keira Knightley, but today I found out that in fact I do. She admitted in a recent interview to not having owned a television for the last five years. Chapeau bas! What a result! What a terrific celebrity endorsement and a resounding victory against the mindless invasion of the goggle box into our everyday lives!
For years I have been mercilessly lampooned by friends and acquaintances alike for my unorthodox lifestyle choice of having no TV. In an age of increasingly large plasma flat-screens and surround sound, digital home entertainment systems which accost you the minute you walk into someone’s house, people regularly look at me like I’m either severely handicapped or chronically hard done by when I mention that I have no television. I can see the mixture of genuine pity, raw pathos and sheer disbelief in their faces as they stare at me open-mouthed.
And no, contrary to the jokes and insinuations from the equally incredulous young people I mentor in Peckham, it’s not because I can’t afford to pay the TV license.
A Lister Keira Knightley has announced she doesn't have a TV When I tell the kids the real reason why I don’t have a TV - because books and the radio have far better pictures – you can literally see the disbelief etched on their faces: that someone actually chooses to live in the 21st century without a television in their house, let alone wanting one in their kitchen, bedroom and living room too, as most young people seem to have nowadays.
The odd documentary on the BBC, C4 or Sky Arts apart, TV holds little of interest for me. Yet I am certainly no cloistered anchorite. In my spare time I go out, read a lot, listen to music and to the radio, where I also get my daily intake of news. I wake up to Radio 4’s Today programme and go to bed to the dulcet tones of Miles Davis or Dexter Gordon. I never feel I’m missing out by not having a TV.
To be honest, I have enough problems in my own life, without adding to them by watching contrived effusions of saccharine emotion like Strictly, X Factor, badly written soap operas acutely lacking in psychological veracity or trashy, faux-reality shows. And don’t even get me started on the mind-numbingly depressing daytime drivel which is an affront to our collective intelligence!
Sadly it came as no surprise to learn that during last summer’s riots, Waterstone’s book store was the only shop on Clapham High Street not to get looted, whereas those shops selling electrical products like TVs and DVD players suffered huge amounts of damage.
To prove that I’m not taking some shamelessly elitist and snobbishly high brow stance, I readily admit that as a kid growing up I watched far too much TV - so much so in fact that I almost got square eyes! To this day, I attribute my (admittedly idiosyncratic) penchant for the late 80s and early 90s classic action films of Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme to this fact.
But ever since going to university, I discovered that I was too busy doing far more interesting things like reading, going to the theatre, hearing live music and socializing with friends, to ever miss it, let alone to want to actively purchase one myself. So the habit stuck and I’ve never owned a TV since. Annoyingly, every few years, I still get imperious letters from the TV licence people, as they too seem unable to believe that there are still a few people who manage to live quite happy and fulfilling existences without the need for a TV.
We need to encourage a cultural paradigm shift in our society, so that instead of those with no TV being seen as slightly gauche weirdos or as acne-ridden deviants and social pariahs, so much poorer for being unable to participate in the water-cooler moment at the office the next day, they are actively celebrated as intelligent pioneers and free thinkers who refuse to slavishly genuflect before a high altar of vacuous mind control, and as people, both young and old, who want more out of life than reclining on their sofas imbibing artificial dross and mental effluvia for hours upon end, night after night.
I have enough problems in my own life, without adding to them by watching contrived effusions of saccharine emotion like Strictly, X Factor As human beings, the mind is the greatest weapon we have at our disposal. As such, we must seek to nourish it. In my experience (Chuck Norris, Stallone and Van Damme films apart), TV seldom nourishes minds, but often ends up destroying brain cells.
In fact, we should encourage more young people to spurn the siren-like calls and the Circean charms of TV. With no TV, young people would probably read much more, which can only be a good thing for their intellectual, social and emotional development and increase how interesting they are as people.
I'd wager that their imaginations would also develop exponentially. Imagination and the capacity to use it are priceless attributes which tangibly contribute to our humanity. TV more often than not deadens our senses and stifles young peoples’ capacity for imagination and thought.
Destruction: Is our TV culture stifling the development of our children? Young people would also probably be able to communicate far more articulately and intelligently if they didn’t have a TV and their ability to make proper eye contact when talking to an adult would undoubtedly increase too. Moreover, TV also dulls their desire to pursue hobbies – in short to do something more interesting than being a passive, inactive sloth.
To be sure, television is a great invention, if handled in moderation. The composite etymological derivation (from the Greek and the Latin words – literally meaning “to see from afar”) tells of a tremendous technological feat which certainly deserves to be applauded. What’s more, if one is discerning, it can be the source of some quality entertainment, instruction and enjoyment. Some of the nature documentaries and arts programmes on BBC 2 are truly fantastic and are well worth the license fee alone.
But the sad reality is that young people are rarely discerning and, by dint of poor time management skills, often end up wasting an inordinate amount of precious, never-returning time watching trash, their brains wallowing in a trough of mental lethargy.
Ambushed: The TV has replaced family interaction and conversation I’m really not meaning to sound like some antediluvian, young(ish) fuddy-duddy from a bygone era, an unrepentant Luddite and a proud throwback to some medieval monastery where monks illuminated manuscripts or went for bracing country walks for pleasure (although I do like medieval manuscripts). I just think our culture’s massively disproportionate emphasis on TV is actually detrimental to our brains and also debilitating to our values.
Congratulations to the eminently talented Miss Knightley for using her celebrity status to give voice to an important truth. Hopefully her admission will encourage the young people who admire her and look up to her to do the same and shun TV and go and do something more profitable, more rewarding and more valuable with their time instead. Televisions might help us exist, but they certainly don’t help us to live.
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