A medium of no importance

1. Grown-ups, as any child will tell you, are monstrous hypocrites, especially when it comes to television. It is to take their minds off their own tele-addiction that adults are so keen to hear and talk about the latest report on the effects of programmes on children. Surely all that nonsense they watch must be desensitizing them, making them vicious, shallow, acquisitive, less responsible and generally sloppy about life and death? But no, not a scrap of convincing evidence from the sociologists and experts in the psyches of children.

2. The nation has lived with the box for more than sixty years now and has passed from total infatuation – revived temporarily by the advent of colour – to the present casual obsession which is not unlike that of the well-adjusted alcoholic. And now the important and pleasant truth is breaking, to the horror of the programme makers and their detractors alike, that television really does not affect much at all. This is tough on those diligent professionals who produce excellent work; but since – a everyone agrees- awful programmes far outnumber the good, it is a relief to know the former cannot do much harm. Television cannot event make impressionable children less pleasant.

3. Television turns out to be no great transformer of minds or society. We are not, en masse, as it was once predicted we would be, fantastically well-informed about other cultures or about the origins of life on earth. People do not remember much from television documentary beyond how good it was. Only those who knew something about the subject in the first place retain the information.

4. Documentaries are not what most people watch anyway. Television is at its most popular when it celebrates its own present. Its ideal subjects are those that need not be remembered and can be instantly replaced, where what matters most is what is happening now and what is going to happen next. Sport, news, panel games, cop shows, long-running soap operas, situation comedies – these occupy us only for as long as they are on. However good or 59 bad it is, a night’s viewing is wonderfully forgettable. It’s a little sleep, it’s Entertainment; our morals, and for that matter, our brutality, remains intact.

5. The box is further neutralized by the sheer quantity people watch. The more of it you see, the less any single bit matters. Of course, some programmes are infinitely better than others. There are gifted people working in television. But seen from a remoter perspective – say, four hours a night viewing for three months – the quality of individual programmes means as much as the quality of each car in the rush-hour traffic.

6. For the heavy viewer, TV has only two meaningful states – on and off. What are the kids are doing? Watching TV. No need to ask what, the answer is sufficient. Soon, I’ll go up there and turn it off. Like a light bulb it will go out and the children will do something else.

7. It appears the nation’s children spend more time in front of their TVs than in the classroom. Their heads are full of TV – but that’s all, just TV. The Kojak violence they witness is TV violence, sufficient to itself. It does not brutalise them to the point where they cannot grieve the loss of a pet, or be shocked at some minor playground violence. Children, like everyone else, know the difference between TV and life. TV knows its place. It imparts nothing but itself; it has its own rules, its own language, its own priorities. It is because this little glowing, chattering screen barely resembles life at all that it remains so usefully ineffectual. To stare at a brick wall would waste time in a similar way. The difference is that the brick wall would let you know you were wasting your time.

8. Whatever the TV/video industry might now say, television will never have an impact in civilization that the invention of the written word has had. The book – this little hinged thing- is cheap, portable, virtually unbreakable, endlessly reusable, has instant replay facilities and in slow motion if you want it, needs no power lines, batteries or aerials, works in planes and train tunnels, can be stored indefinitely without much deterioration, is less amenable to censorship and centralized control, can be written and manufactured by relatively unprivileged individuals or groups, and – most sophisticated of all – dozens of different ones can be going at the same time, in the same room without a sound.

Грамматика.

В любом грамматическом справочнике или учебнике найти материал и упражнения по следующим темам:

А) Reported Speech (утверждения, вопросы, просьбы)

Б) The Passive Voice (для времен группы Simple, Continuous, Perfect)

В) The Subjunctive Mood (формирование сказуемого во всех типах придаточных условия)

Г) The Infinitive (Complex Object, Complex Subject); the Gerund

Разобрать теорию, выполнить несколько упражнений по каждой теме. Этот материал будет рассмотрен на занятиях в январе.