David Burke is a man with a mission: he wants to rid the world of television. Thirteen years ago, Burke decided the time had come for him to take his protest on to the streets. One morning in 1996, he climbed on top of a symbolically busted TV set outside Westminster Abbey and called on Prince Charles to ban TV cameras from his coronation – whenever that might be. As the Queen’s coronation in 1953 had marked the start of widespread television viewing in the UK, a TV-free Charles coronation would, felt Burke, have a pleasing symmetry to it.
A few days later, he received a reply from Charles’s office; the Prince of Wales thanked him for his interest, but felt that he was unable to comply with his request. Burke was not greatly surprised by this, but nor was he disheartened. He’d always known that convincing the world he was right was going to be an uphill struggle.
On Monday, Burke, a 44-year-old expatriate American with a cheerfully undaunted air, will launch his 13th annual TV Turnoff Week. Once again, he will invite people to unshackle themselves, however briefly, from their television sets and sample the joys of a TV-free life. Posters in cities round the country will call on people to “Get Out of the Box”, while in Brighton – a big centre for anti-TV campaigners, largely because Burke has lots of friends there – residents will be encouraged to sit outside their front doors and chat with their neighbours for a change. The benefits, he claims, will be instantaneous. Not only will people feel better about themselves and become more self-reliant, but their creative resources will blossom too.
At the heart of the anti-TV movement is a simple and, as the campaigners see it, irrefutable fact: television turns people’s brains to cardboard and their bodies into blubber. Just look at the statistics, they say.
According to the most recent figures, taken from a Office of National Statistics survey in 2006/2007, 84 per cent of men and 85 per cent of women in Britain rate television viewing as their most popular leisure activity. By comparison, “Spending time with family or friends” was chosen by 75 per cent of men and 82 per cent of women. People watched an average of 3.88 hours of TV a day, so by the age of 75 the average Briton will have spent more than 12 years of his or her life watching television.
“One of the strange things about television is that almost everyone feels guilty about the amount of time they spend watching it,” says Burke. “It’s as if they know in their hearts that they’re doing something they shouldn’t.”
Dr Aric Sigman, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, is convinced it is the latter. In a 2007 address to MPs, Sigman called unfettered TV-watching “the greatest unacknowledged health scandal of our time”. He also advised that no child under three should be allowed to watch television. Far from helping children acquire language skills and teaching them about the world, Sigman reckons TV is more likely to scramble their brains – maybe literally so. (A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1999 linked “early exposure to television during critical periods of synaptic [brain cell] development” to attentional problems” – in particular, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), now the most common behavioural disorder in US children.)
the average child in the UK will have watched an entire year’s worth of television by the time they are six, and more than half of three-year-olds now have televisions in their bedrooms.
Last August, France’s government decided to ban TV channels from airing shows aimed at children under three. According to the French broadcasting authority, Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel: “Television viewing hurts the development of children under three years old and poses a number of risks, encouraging passivity, slow language acquisition, over-excitedness, trouble with sleep and concentration as well as dependence on screens.”
The history of television is full of troubling evidence of its effects. In the mid-1960s, an unnamed Canadian town – dubbed Notel by researchers (short for No Television) – received television for the first time. Researchers monitored the effect it had on the town’s schoolchildren. After two years of TV watching, the children were subjected to a battery of tests designed to gauge their reactions to a number of social situations. These tests revealed the children to be three times more aggressive than they had been before. A nearby TV-free town that was also monitored, showed no such increase. At the same time, levels of social interaction in Notel fell by 25 per cent. More recently, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan became, in 1999, the last country on earth to introduce television. Within months, it was experiencing the first crime wave in its history. A 2003 government-sponsored “Impact Study” conducted by Bhutanese academics found television had caused increasing crime, corruption, an uncontrolled desire for western products and changed attitudes to relationships. One-third of Bhutanese girls wanted to look more American – with whiter skin and blonde hair – while 35 per cent of parents preferred to watch TV than talk to their own children.
Such studies are alarming but do they offer conclusive evidence? Many people – not all of them employed by the TV industry – would argue that these findings are nonsense. Indeed, the past few years have seen a fightback by the pro-TV lobby.
TV Turnoff Week runs from April 20-26. For more details see www.whitedot.org
– from FT
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