TV and you

When I lived up in Maine on the Canadian border I used to watch CBC every Sunday morning. Where else can you catch candle-pin bowling and/or curling nowadays.? (They did have a lot of good wildlife shows too though!)

PBS NEWS HOUR and thats about it...

Ooo! I forgot about watching football in the fall. I guess that adds about 10 hours on Sundays between September and January.

Curling!!!!, LOL
If I had a dollar for everytime I had to explain the game to an American, when I worked in hotels. ha ha ha
Sweeeeeeeeeeep!

None during the week. If I'm not going out on Saturday night, I'll watch 2 or 3 episodes of whatever's on TLC. My latest addiction there is Clean Sweep. Occasionally, an hour or so on Sunday. Usually none.

Remind me - why do I have a satellite, and get about 160+ channels?

It's really more of a "sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep" isn't it?

Thanks for writing in, everyone. I might get cut off in the middle of writing this, because my Internet connection is all skewered; if so, I'll be back.

Ah, Curling! I thought that it was completely bland and painful to watch, but I was part of the team that won the Ayrshire divisional curling championship in the mid 1990s. What a claim to fame.

Wow fbaezer, your time in directing TV is really amazing. I think that you had got the right mixture of shows to get people watching. Would you go back if they offered you the same job tomorrow? If I were head of a TV network, I would expect hardly anyone to watch.

Do you (all) think that TV stifles children's imaginations, or builds them? There's a gap of nearly two decades between my half-siblings and I; I object to the fact that they must watch about five hours of TV a day.

Craven: Your ideas about TV are much like mine. I've seen every episode of Family Guy, Seinfeld and The Simpsons too; they must be amongst the three best series made within the last twenty years.

TV over here on Sundays is abysmal; although most families watch quite a bit of TV then, the networks run absolute RUBBISH. Crappy B movies; sports that interest hardly anyone (darts; bowls;) old clichéd and sexist shows from the 1970s shown because they can't be bothered to make anything new; repeats, repeats, repeats.

What do you all think about cable/sattelite TV?

I would say i watch alot of t.v. I don't like any of that reality t.v. shows. I just watch alot of movies and i like to watch the Discover channel and Court t.v.

I think that at any given time, there are things that are more useful/ productive for children to be doing than watching TV. I don't think it builds children's imaginations, specifically, though I don't think it stifles them per se either -- my main thing with TV is just that drawing, or running around in the backyard, or playing with other kids, or almost anything, offers MORE benefits than TV.

So I'd say that 5 hours a day is excessive, because of all of the things that the kids are missing out on while they are watching TV.

Yeah, if they watch TV for five hours when are they going to play video game?

Muzik, Discovery HD Theater (the channel) makes upgrading to HD worthwhile in and of itself.

It was in the early 60's, my fisrt stay in England.

My guest parents could catch me (14 years old) at the station. So they sent a friend.

She didn't really know what to do with me during the next couple of hours. So she decided that I got join her two toddlers .... watching tv. (Even with my rather poor school English - I'm sure - I understood more of the programs than they did!)


We didn't have tv at home at that time - but this was one of the crucial experience that I never became a fan of watching tv!

Sozobe-- I agree. TV is a very unproductive way of keeping children quiet. If I were their parent- God forbid-, I certainly wouldn't do what my mother has done.

Cjsha-- luckily, they have none. They get hyperactive and start fighting themselves. Thank Heavens for the age difference.

Walter- how awful, getting you to watch TV with toddlers! When I was younger, I did nearly everything to avoid watching TV.

The weirdest thing is that some people will watch programmes that they know that they will not like/ that bore them for hours! This is probably due to a lack of ideas to do anything else... but I can't understand it.

I think TV has a certain... how to say... meditative quality? A way to be without thinking. I would come home from very stressful, emotion-filled, high-octane days at work and just veg for a while in front of the TV, didn't matter much what was on. The point was to NOT think about the craziness of the day.

Very few shows can do that to me-I can't stop from thinking, which is- at times- unfortunate. Even when sick, I can't just relax... unless I go to sleep.

I watch NBC Soap Opera's everyday, and good family shows at night, except for Threat Matrix. If I ran a TV Network, it would be a lot like PBS and Pax Net.

Sport - most certainly yes if it is a good game. Apart from that, even though I have 4 TVs in the house (now just dont ask me why) I hardly watch TV, except for the news. Or if there is a good movie (and I am at home, which is a lot these days)