untelevised

A couple of the blogs I read regularly brought TV onto my radar in the last day or two, and I felt a post bubbling up after commenting on Kate’s Personal Hell yesterday. Fact is I almost never think about television, let alone talk about it, though I know that puts me in a minority position in today’s world.

And I try to stifle the peevishness that comes over me when a perfectly decent cocktail party or book club conversation is suddenly hijacked by a flurry of animation over the latest episode of RealitydujourHouse24GraysWhatever, where others flock to join in, and the hope of any other topic is rapidly obliterated in a blizzard of teeveetalk.

I should say that being on the outside of this sort of discussion is a familiar stroll for me. Although in my adult life, it’s clearly by choice (I simply don’t have inclination, let alone time), the same can’t be said for my childhood. I distinctly remember the mortification of innocently asking, “Who’s Morgan Mindy?” one Friday morning at school (“Mork & Mindy,” you may recall, was part of the Thursday lineup). I was not a Cool Kid to begin with, and such glaring faux pas did little to enhance my image.

I have an early memory of once watching Captain Kangaroo in the upstairs of our house in Indiana, but when we moved to Ohio, where I began kindergarten, the TV did not travel with us. Television didn’t re-enter our home until a timeframe somewhere around maybe my twelfth year. At that point, my brother and I were each allotted 30 minutes, show of our choice.  30 minutes a week, that is.

We could pool our time and watch two half-hour shows together, or an hour-long one. I don’t remember much, but I remember that for a period it was Tuesday nights, with Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. And then I know I had a phase watching Star Trek reruns. And yes, we would sneak whenever we could. You betcha.

All of our viewing was on a petite screen, in black & white of course. I remember laughing quite hysterically when I first saw the Channel 7 news on a friend’s color TV — I’d had no idea that the anchor (Jim somebody, Dayton Ohio, circa 1980, anyone?) was blond and for some reason it struck me as hilarious.

We got 3 VHF channels and one UHF, none of them very clearly. Some had the tendency to show people as if in one of those funhouse mirrors: wiggly through the middle, with the heads elongated like a Simpson character. Though Matt Groenig was probably still in diapers then.

My childhood deprivation means I am one of the only people I know in my decade who cannot sing the Gilligan theme song (though I can fake most of it and have used “three-hour-tour” quite wittily at times). Nor can I name any of the Bradys, though I’m pretty sure there were 6 of them — 8 counting the adults. (Hey, did her kids retain their given surnames? I just started to wonder.)

There is, in fact, a fairly broad cultural lacunae that exists for me, similar in many respects to the way that my husband describes how he never quite fit in in Sweden when he moved there as an adult — the common culture of reference, rooted in childhood, binds more tightly, excludes more easily, than anyone on the inside ever realizes.

Having suffered through it, and — I believe now — gained immeasurably from it, I fully intend to inflict the same torture on my girls. Fortunately for marital harmony, the MPM, raised on an all-American diet of as much TV as he ever desired, is on board with this wackadoodle notion.

My reasons are myriad. Start with the part where I just never think about the TV. (Along with some exercise equipment that I plan to sell on Craigslist as soon as I get around to it, it lives in the back bedroom, where none of us go.)

But more importantly, I don’t WANT to think about it. I don’t want to have to monitor what they’re watching and what they should be and what they shouldn’t be. I don’t want one more topic for arguments with children in my life; we seem to have a plentiful abundance of them as it is. Call it lazy. Call it sanity. I’m not budging, at least not for a few more years. But unless pressed, I don’t talk about my choice, so I’d like to think that keeps me from the camp of the self-righteous.

I read a fascinating book a few years back called Consuming Kids that gave me a lot of things to think about, such as the vast amount of money that’s dumped into targeting products to children, and how that is Not A Good Thing. No, it’s really not. The book introduced me to a concept known in the industry as the Nag Factor: marketing that teaches your children how to nag you in the most effective way. People STUDY THIS STUFF, you bet your bippy they do. And they turn around and apply it, and it does not improve your life. It feeds the big money machine, but it does not make for happier parents.

This “getting older younger” thing that’s happening, the whole thongs-for-the-under-10-set? Marketing, my friends. You can call it cultural influence, but again, this is closely observed behavior, channeled and directed: kids want to be cool. How to be cool? Act like the older kids. How do the older kids act? Watch right here. We’ll show you, between commercial breaks. And during.

Now. I pay no attention, zero, to what other people let their kids do. I don’t monitor, I don’t observe, I don’t condemn, I don’t judge, I just don’t care. Your kids, your choice.

Well, unless my kid plays at your house many hours a week and I learn that she has been spending a portion of that time that I deem excessive watching something called Noggin. Then I might have a teeny issue with it. But again, only as it pertains to MY kid. And we can work it out in the friendliest of ways, because I know that it’s MY thing.

And some of you regular readers may recall a reference or two to Dora (via DVD), and her contribution to adult fun here at Casa Fraught. And my husband (who will intentionally turn on the occasional sporting event) will likely suggest I might be remiss if I didn’t fess up to my brief fling with Gray’s Anatomy, and my longer infatuation with West Wing, and my interminably drawn-out love affair with Seinfeld. So be assured, we’re hardly purists.

Am I aware that this is not reality? Sure. And in a few years, the pain of not having TV is probably going to supersede the pain of having it, and we’ll start with a half-hour, oh, say every other day. And see where that goes.

Fact is it might be nice to have a few more privileges to toss around when things start getting out of hand around here. But Hannah Montana? Do I really have to?