Televisual

So, at home, we don't have television.

I mean we have A television. We just can't get satellite signal or anything, so we just use it for streaming or gaming. It gets used, most of the time.

I don’t miss television.

I mean I miss some things. The chance of coming across something you weren't expecting. The shows that haven't made it onto youtube, netflix or some other online option.

The list of things I don't miss...

Well let's start with advertising. Commercials are 90% awful. Like genuinely terrible. There's several types of ad, but they broadly divide into the pretentious (cars and aftershave) and the insipid (most other shit). With the exception of standouts like the Guinness ads and the occasional rather funny Danepak piece, the rest drive me to distraction to the point of actual anger.

Then there's the network advertising itself. If two thirds of the commercials you see are for products you don't want, the last third is to try and make you either buy subscriptions to another TV service that funds the channel you were originally watching, or for other shows on partner channels. Get a Sky subscription! Watch other episodes of that show that you kind of don't care about! Clips of sports!

And then we come to the core of it: the actual programming.

When I used to have a TV, it was almost always stuck on a rock music channel, the cooking channel, or a gameshow channel. All of these things can just be watched pn and off, and don't require continuity. Perhaps it is personal, but if I was to watch a TV drama or similar, I would want to watch it on my schedule - not at the whim of The Channel Network or whatever.

Also - paying a significant amount of cash per month to watch ten different shows dressed up into four hundred different titles is a bit of a joke. Ever noticed that all the historical dramas look the same? Shot the same way, same beats, same intro... same with cop shows. Same with what I call the Right-Wing Loyalty Shows - reality police shows, border control, debt collectors, everything that follows authority around and shows you that they're the good guys, really.

Skim through the channels. See if there's anything you REALLY want to watch, or if it's just something that will "do".

So on the rare occcasion that I miss having a TV, I just boot up YouTube...