Adam's first law of television: the weight of the backside is greater than the force of the intellect.
TV: Electronic entertainment currently devised to seduce and sell the public ideas that will enable companies to extort money or personal interest from people subliminally convinced that they want and subsequently need their product. The product can be hard or intangible: a new computer; a bottle of brandy; an over-fifties' insurance policy; frozen carrots that talk, walk and sing; a romantic holiday in the Seychelles with the opportunity to meet an imagined partner; information about job opportunities and financial benefits for the needy; world, national and local news with or without a bias; the newest line in bodily hygiene; a way to lose 15lbs of unsightly flesh without decapitation.
So the question remains: Whether it is nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of an outrageous assault by the electronic media or to take arms against the onslaughts eroding the defences of the mind and by opposing end them?
As far as inanities on the box are concerned, live blackjack has to be one of the most mind-numbing programmes ever devised-showing on some sports channel. From an audience hall more that three-quarters empty of spectators, a few of them watch the progress of three participants in the blackjack game seated in a semi-circle around a fat, expressionless dealer in a tight grey suit. Two of the players look confidently poker-faced at the cards dealt to them and the third lolls nonchalantly on one elbow (a Jewish Woody Allen lookalike or he just looks intelligent) wearing casual clothes and peering at his cards through bi-focal glasses.
Suddenly, one of the players is bust and having had his chips, leaves the stage and is actually applauded for his efforts to beat the banker. Here we have a close up of an aged, wrinkled man in the front row along with a youngish looking woman of indeterminate relationship. The backdrop is a Rubinesque adumbration of ghostly faces and...no!-surely the volume of the applause cannot be attributed to this sparse audience: it occurs to me that the acclamation is canned.
Only topless darts, indoor bowling, curling and cricket can be considered amongst the most inane creations of the media along with blackjack. (In reality, I won over $300 in a casino in upstate NY last year, not big news; but when did gambling become a spectator sport and what's to gain...or lose?)
A friend said recently, "Better 10-minutes of the Torah that 2-hours of TV." Well, reading the back of a cereal packet is more worthwhile, I guess.
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