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Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Maybe we need to get out more
By Fr Brendan Hoban
BY THE time you read this the World Cup will be over. Thank God for small mercies. In all, wasn’t it as predictably boring as ever?
Millionaires moving the ball over and back the field, with new and unexplored levels of sheer boredom building by the minute. One team trying to stop the other team from scoring. Nil all. What else is new?
Yet we watched it day after day, listened to the predictable analysis, investing an inordinate amount of our time in it. And for what? I blame television not just for the blanket coverage of every match but for creating the impression that it mattered at all – which, of course, they needed to do for commercial reasons. The best part of the World Cup was looking forward to it, allowing ourselves to be convinced that it really mattered.
Television obsesses us. Even though so much of it is repetitious, tedious in the extreme and utterly uninteresting the very fact that something is on television seems in itself to exalt it to a different level. And seems to exalt those who appear on it. In the dim and distant past that truth was well flagged by indifferent performers who, because they appeared once on television, could forever be described as ‘of UTV fame’.
While television has come a long way, our absurd fascination with it has not changed. I saw my first television set in Byron’s window in Ballina. It was black and white, had a picture showing everything happening in what appeared to be a dense snowfall but it was endlessly fascinating. I had just about heard of television but couldn’t imagine the luxury not to say unspeakable delight of having ‘the pictures’ at home.
‘The pictures’ as we called them, were what you could attend on Friday night if your behaviour for the previous week reached an acceptable standard. The threat of curfew on Friday nights hung like a dark pall over an innocent childhood. For nine old pence you could savour the Wild West escapades of Randolph Scott; go to war with Gary Cooper or, on occasion, enter into the mysterious romantic world of Clark Gable. (We preferred Raldolph Scott!)
Then suddenly the prospect of a national television service became a reality. Television sets were rare enough and became the modern equivalent of the old battery radio. Locals gathered into whatever house was lucky or prosperous enough to have one, to watch RTE’s first faltering steps in production supplemented by a thin diet of cheap American imports.
A memory, for me, was watching episodes of ‘The Rough Riders’ and ‘Bat Masterson’ in Tom J O’Boyle’s house in Doonfeeney. We watched, as became the custom, fascinated until the little white light indicating the end of the day’s transmission disappeared in the centre of the screen. Another memory was seeing, for the first time, a colour television in 1971 in America. But in what seemed like a matter of months, suddenly RTE introduced colour transmission and there in what they called “living colour”, was Gay Byrne and his Late Late Show.
It seemed beyond belief that in one corner of one’s own kitchen the news events of the world could be watched, different lifestyles evaluated, different perspectives realised, the world all of a sudden becoming a much smaller place.
Demand escalated. A generation earlier people waited for the newly-charged wet battery to be transported home on the carrier of a Raleigh bicycle so that the delights of Din Joe and Take the Floor could be savoured on the radio. A generation later there was a clamour for a second television channel. Remember Conor Cruise O’Brien, everyone’s favourite Irishman, getting himself twisted into knots over whether BBC 1 should be broadcast to the nation? Or whether the Irish people in their wisdom would prefer more home-produced programmes? In the event, RTE 2 – now Network 2 – was the answer, so Conor Cruise must have been asking the wrong questions!
It all seems so long ago. Now the satellite dish beams hundreds of channels for every taste and for none and the remote control has afforded us the privilege of skipping from channel to channel, watching a bit of many programmes and all of none.
Meanwhile in the slipstream of such technological developments, we find that we’re reading fewer books, buying fewer newspapers, conversing less even with family members in the same room, over-impressed by television performers and the sometimes doubtful values they propagate, and remain captivated by the flickering tyrant in the corner of the room.
It’s not all, of course, a negative dividend. Television has had an enormous influence for good. Information has been made available, education has been facilitated, entertainment has been provided at a level once regarded as unimaginable. The great events of the world can now be brought to us at the touch of a button.
Meanwhile a new generation has grown up with it, a generation who never knew about the unquestioned certainties of the past, a generation, too, that has sometimes indiscriminately ingested the fickle mid-Atlantic values of ‘the box’. It is a generation that accepts as normal the kind of technological development that had the rest of us sitting in watchful wonder. Maybe a generation too that television has, for all its vaunted virtues, ultimately deprived of wonder.
I remember reading somewhere about an African tribe that refused to be photographed because they felt that somehow the experience diminished them in some way. Maybe they got it right after all. Maybe the false world conjured up by the camera ultimately diminishes rather than enhances the experience of a full human life.
Maybe the box in the corner is divesting us of that sense of wonder that helps us appreciate the vastness of God’s world and the majesty and wonder of God’s creation. Maybe we’re watching too much television. Maybe we need to get out more.
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