People that Say they don't watch TV

[Aquarius1234]

OMG so annoying. Esp those that lie.
You do watch TV so stop making out you spend all evening not looking at a screen!
Or those that say they never watch movies or go cinema. You then find out they go twice a year.
Watching sport or netflix counts as watching tv regardless if you watch it on your laptop or not.

@Gwenhwyfar
presumably when the BBC wasn’t broadcasting ‘til death Do us part’ anymore
😭

but I don’t think that many children watch tv now at all.

I'd say that your child and his friends were anomalies if they truly all never watch TV. Bonding over TV shows or what they are watching on netflix etc is still very much the done thing in every school I've taught at in the past few years and as a supply teacher that sample size is pretty extensive.

He’s been at three schools in two countries and I just haven’t seen much evidence of extensive tv watching across the board. I’m not saying none at all, just that ‘screen time’ is very much gaming, and tv, when it happens, seems to be a ‘family activity’ often initiated by parents.

@Gwenhwyfar

I've seen the 'BBC only' thing quoted here on MN many times by women talking about their own childhoods. Snobby mothers I think!

Totally. There was no other rational explanation for it whatsoever.

My parents didn't go quite as far as banning non BBC but they had similarly Reithian attitudes. TV was basically something which working class people did because they were too lazy to do anything else and an a far inferior pursuit to reading (or basically anything else). My mum (who was a raging snob) used to walk into the room when we were watching TV and get visibly twitchy and anxious about it as if we were being brainwashed by it. If it was BBC (childrens programmes or news/current affairs) she would tolerate it. If it was anything American or ITV or with the whiff of mass entertainment about it she would mutter on about how "ghastly" it was and eventually turn it off in disgust. Adverts used to make her froth at the mouth.

I have to really fight some of these instincts with my own DD as YouTube/Tiktok trigger some of these responses in me. I'm (just about) self-aware enough to understand that my response is not rational and to understand that this is the medium which children use to communicate. But it's sometimes hard for me to unpick what is legitimate concern about inappropriate or unwholesome content and what is just the ghost of my mother and her judgement about mass entertainment.

I can, however, recognise this with laser-like accuracy in other adults of my generation who had a similar upbringing. When another adult says "oh we never watch TV (but we do watch documentaries on Netflix", a part of me goes: "I see you and I know exactly what your game is."

People who say they don't watch TV (but actually do watch documentaries or highbrow series on Netflix) are basically snobs.

Maybe they don't. Does it matter?

Maybe some people use the term "TV" the same way that a lot of people "hoover" their carpets.

My DM was and is the biggest TV addict you could ever meet, but when we were little we weren't allowed to tell people she watched all the soaps :)

Also in the 70s and 80s some people had their TVs hidden by a cupboard and when satellites and wide screens first came out they were also seen as common.

@Gwenhwyfar

Also in the 70s and 80s some people had their TVs hidden by a cupboard and when satellites and wide screens first came out they were also seen as common.

Yep. Entertainment is the real front line of snobbery and the Byzantine weirdness of class attitudes today. It’s always been a subtle but unmistakable class cue but it’s far more complicated and even harder to understand with streaming, multichannel TV and the internet.

Much of this neurosis we have (writ large on this thread) about Netflix and all the stuff about “not watching TV” is people acting out weird shit their parents passed on to them back in the 1980s about what your TV habits signal to the neighbourhood about you.

I posted this upthread earlier but non British people find this sort of thing utterly bonkers and they are right. It’s crackers.

Lord Reith has a lot to answer for.

I don’t disagree with you about it being a class shibboleth (though I’m not British I lived in the UK for nearly 30 years), and the hair-trigger responses on this thread demonstrate that it’s clearly way more for some people than just ‘not sharing a widespread hobby’.

I don’t think it’s just that, though. I think there’s a real strand of anti-intellectualism in UK culture, and part of the reason discussions about not watching tv get such kneejerk responses is that people think that someone who says they don’t watch tv is claiming some form of superior intellectual status. When someone says ‘I don’t watch tv’, what people hear is ‘I’m clever. I’m cleverer than you.’ Which is akin to saying you torture kittens in the public approval stakes.

I don’t think it’s just that, though. I think there’s a real strand of anti-intellectualism in UK culture, and part of the reason discussions about not watching tv get such kneejerk responses is that people think that someone who says they don’t watch tv is claiming some form of superior intellectual status. When someone says ‘I don’t watch tv’, what people hear is ‘I’m clever. I’m cleverer than you.’ Which is akin to saying you torture kittens in the public approval stakes.

I disagree. Unless there is something added to "I don't watch TV" there is nothing superior.
However, we had bunch of wxamples here of the percieved aelf superiority

If you want to see example of somewhat ridiculous "class issue" we foreigners are baffled by, there is a thread where someone said they wouldn't buy house with mirror furniture because it indicates what type of neighbours are around...
I wonder what they would say about tv watching!

@Pillowjoy

I don’t think it’s just that, though. I think there’s a real strand of anti-intellectualism in UK culture, and part of the reason discussions about not watching tv get such kneejerk responses is that people think that someone who says they don’t watch tv is claiming some form of superior intellectual status. When someone says ‘I don’t watch tv’, what people hear is ‘I’m clever. I’m cleverer than you.’ Which is akin to saying you torture kittens in the public approval stakes.

I agree that there's a culture of anti-intellectualism in the UK (although I actually think that applies in a lot of cultures). I think if you went to most European countries and walked into a home and said "I don't watch TV" you would get similar reactions from many people.

But the fact that you think saying: "I don't watch TV" is a way of saying "I'm cleverer than you" is an admission that this is basically what it sets out to achieve. I do think at some level (whether conscious or otherwise) this is what this statement is designed to communicate. Given that that is the cultural shorthand, perhaps it's not surprising it makes people feel so defensive. It's a bit like other cultural cues which are associated with self-conscious "cleverness" or sophistication. Saying you only eat organic food, or that you could never work for a multinational corporation, for example. It's usually a way of stealthily signalling a) that you "get it" and are in the know b) that your financial or cultural "richness" is such that you don't need to do things which ordinary people need to do.

Also let's unpick the concept of being an "intellectual" a bit. Why should watching TV be intrinsically less "clever" than other pursuits? All human life is on TV. You can watch things that are impenetrably highbrow or absolute trash on the same channel in the same 24 hours. There's nothing inherent to the medium which is less "clever". I've argued upthread that this dates back to the birth of television in the UK and the way people saw it as a mass medium and I can't get away from the idea that this is what it comes down to.

And why should "intellectualism" be the preserve only of those people who seek to distance themselves from the masses? If you set yourself up as someone who chooses pursuits to underline their own status as an intellectual, and in doing so in rejecting things that bring pleasure and information to ordinary people, you can see why this gets people's backs up.

Tv can be "intellectual".
Great way to learn languages. I learned most of my English with TV and I am currently learning fourth with the help of Netflix.

I hardly ever watch TV. The vast majority is mindless, woke garbage. That said, I have a soft spot for Bake Off. Actually, I quite like shows like that – where you have a bunch of random people competing at something (masterchef, etc). But I can't bear the soaps, and I never watch any dramas, which are badly-written, badly-acted, PC drivel. I also find 99% of films unwatchable.

TV has dumbed down for sure. I have recently been watching old episdodes of 'Great Philosophers' on youtube. In the 1970s, Bryan Magee, a British philosophy lecturer, made a series of programmes on which he discussed the great philosophers with a guest, usually a British or American professor. They would spend 40 minutes talking about, say, Plato, or Nietzsche, in an intelligent, civilized way – no gimmicks, no music, nothing. Just two highly-educated human beings having a fascinating discussion. God, it's amazing. Such a show would be unimaginable now. If anybody dared, they'd be accused of elitism. Somebody also bought me I Claudius on DVD for Christmas. Again, hard to imagine it being made today – the actors speak in too refined an accent. They also speak too eloquently and quickly.

I don’t watch TV. We stopped watching and paying for it 12 years ago. This was a decision made with my sons that were 10 and 16 at the time as we’d been discussing family budget and when they saw the annual break down etc they didn't feel that the bbc licence and sky fees were worth the money for how much we watched. I read extensively, do many online courses and have several hobbies instead.

I know what is going on in soaps and tv world from social media and friends, news media etc.

I have no idea what the op is getting all worked up about.

I watch one show with my husband and one with my daughter. Sometimes we'll watch something as a family. Frequently we'll watch the first couple of episodes then forget to watch the rest. Never watch live TV (no aerial). Did has been to the cinema 3x in her life. I've not been without a child for 5 years.
I do say we don't watch TV because I actually can't discuss anything that is on TV.

Just say I don’t watch much TV or I rarely watch TV then

Why do you care whether or not other people watch TV? Or what they clam about their tele habits?

You’re misunderstanding me, @Thepeopleversuswork - and you’re a poster I have a lot of time for. I’m not saying that I think tv is inherently anti-intellectual (my —total prick— doctoral supervisor was generally absent doing his regular stint of heavy-duty public intellectual stuff back in the day, and I know quite a few academics who make tv documentaries on art and history), I’m saying I think this is what people hear. They think it’s a claim of intellectual elitism, rather than an entirely neutral choice not to engage in a widespread leisure activity. (Maybe akin to not drinking being greeted with disbelief, attempts to persuade and a sense that the non-drinker must be boring or that there must be some explanation for why they don’t do something so widespread…) I don’t see it as an intellectual decision, it’s just a choice to do other stuff rather than watch tv. From the other current thread about people coming home from work and getting straight into their night clothes, I think I go out more at night than many people on here. Another thing is that don’t have the commitment many people seem to for box sets. The last series I watched was The West Wing. People keep telling me that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are brilliant, but I just can’t commit to that many hours. No judgement on those who do, obviously, but the idea freaks me out.

@Pillowjoy I think post couple of posts above your last one explains why people often hear that.😉

Few, not couple

I very rarely watch tv, maybe a film a month, although I did watch and enjoy Wednesday recently, it's the first series I have watched for years.

@Pillowjoy

They think it’s a claim of intellectual elitism, rather than an entirely neutral choice not to engage in a widespread leisure activity. (Maybe akin to not drinking being greeted with disbelief, attempts to persuade and a sense that the non-drinker must be boring or that there must be some explanation for why they don’t do something so widespread…) I don’t see it as an intellectual decision, it’s just a choice to do other stuff rather than watch tv.

I don't disagree with that. I think that the expectation that everyone "should" watch landmark shows as some sort of cultural moment can be incredibly suffocating. I remember feeling like this about Game of Thrones and, much earlier, Big Brother (and to a lesser extent when the Harry Potter books first came out). People seem insulted by your reluctance to participate and it gets very draining.

I also don't watch a great deal TV because I don't have time, and very little live TV except news, because the timing doesn't work for me. And I will almost never prioritise watching TV over another leisure activity.

But I stand by the fact that I think nine times out of ten when people say: "I don't watch TV" it's a) very rarely true and b) pointed and with an undertone of cultural one-upmanship.

@JoonT what do you mean by ‘woke’ and ‘PC drivel’ exactly? 🤔