A chance to find out there is life beyond TV

Simon Upton - 1 May 1992

Simon Upton, the Minister of Health, recalls a childhood and adolescence without television, and warmly welcomes the “Great New Zealand Television Turn-Off”

The International Arts Festival allows us to imagine, for a brief three-week interglacial, that here in Wellington at least we inhabit a literate and cultivated comer of Eden.

It seems thal, every two years, we summon up the energy for an orgy concert-theatre-gallery going before sinking back mto lumpen lethargy.

Of course orchestras still play, actors still act, choirs still sing and galleries display during the intervening ice ages, but it’s the committed band, the enthusiasts who keep the cultural fires burning. Only at festival time does It all become mainstream. “So like Aix, Edinburgh, or (somewhat rashly) Salzburg!” people exclaim.

And they’re right. For a brief period the sense of exile from all those northern hemisphere Indulgences fades.

For this, Chris Doig deserves a knighthood in distant times, before the advent of the Audit Office and the Public Finance Act — or, for the matter, Parliament - the Governor-General would have already rewarded him with a large country estate plus a handsome lump sum to have it expensively refurbished by Sir Miles Warren.

The reality, of course, is rather more prosaic. Many of the artists brought here will migrate back to warmer climes and leave us to cope with the hangover. For many, exhausted by this biennial bash, it will be back to the box. Or will it?

Just as we were contemplating an inert winter’s viewing, along comes Denis Dutton’s “Great New Zealand Television Turn-off” campaign. The campaign is being promoted by Friends of Radio and the New Zealand Library Association to coincide with Library Week.

Canterbury University describes Dr Dutton as an expert In the philosophy of art, But if that conjures up a pasty-faced, Proustian aesthete ruminating on Rimbaud or Adorno, you’ll be disappointed.

Denis suffers from an irreversible case of North American spontaneity and activism. Worse still, he holds opinions. Lots of them.

As a founder of the New Zealand Skeptics Society he has undermined the credulity of countless believers in spoon bending, fire-walking, little green men and other paranormal paraphernalia.

Now it’s the mind-numbing effect of television that is in his sights.

It is somewhat ironic having poured Paraquat that, on some of the more fertile reaches of the public Imagination, he is now out to resuscitate other categories of neural tissue from prolonged exposure to television.

For someone of my prejudices, the idea is a winner. I grew up almost untainted by television.

I can’t recall exactly when I became aware of its existence - probably some time after I went to school, When questioned about. access to this apparently unlimited supply of entertainment, my Parents were ambiguous. The inhouse explanation provided to me

was that expense placed It “out of the question”.

But I observed a degree of evasion when they discussed the matter with other peoples’ parents. “We’re waiting until it’s in colour,” my father would respond with a smile, confidently pulting the matter Into the indefinite future. (When colour television did arrive it was, needless to say, again “out of the question”.)

This ability to shift the goal posts left me in a virtual television-free zone for the first 17 years of my life. It was not totally absent) — my parents conceded the same level of exemptions that environmentalists allow for nuclear medicine. | seem to recall that various friends and relatives were prevailed upon in strictly limited circumstances — vilis: ation” and “War and Peace” stick in my memory.

My occasional widen this diet were rebuffed with the verdict that it was mostly “Just a load of rubbish”. And in the cocoon that was Wecley Farm, Ngaruawahla, who was I to argue?

Mind you I had precious little real sense of denial. My world was split between boaks, playing in the gully down the back of the farm and fern collecting In the holidays and books. music and avoiding sport al boarding school.

There were always mare projects on the go than I ever had a chance of finishing. (My wife would ask what has changed). My mother’s flower garden was the victim of repeated attempts to redesign iL L grew up in a world in which everything had names —

plants, [and forms, cloud types vonstellations,

When ferns became the passion at around the age of 13, no reserve was safe from my attempts to collecting expeditions. Repeated holidays were spent trying to draw maps of the farm with varying degrees of fantasy. Small creeks became huge river systems in my mind with complex tributaries and deltas, and the discovery that Mt Pirongia, 30 kilometres distant, was a volcano (albeit extinct) left me forever hopeful that some cataclysm would strike. (Hearing my great-uncle talk of the Tarawera eruption from his farm north of the Raglan Harbour left me feeling seriously deprived).

It was a world devoid of

1 don’t say the people who direct television programmes aren’t. creative. They are sometimes stunningly. Bul the act of television-watching Is a passive one. It’s about entertainment; an osmotic, one-way flow of images that ,are fed to us — strong solution to weak. Note, we don’t Imagine — the image is defined “for us. Since ever the act of concentration can be exhausting, the Images are pre-packaged into neat Hittle doses like those time-release drugs.

A-regular. pulse of advertising to numb the mind every six to 12 minutes provides narcotic relief

I have often bemoaned the corrosive effect of television reporting on the ability of a democratic society to take issues seriously, reflect on them, and manage to maintain healthy disagreement and debate television and largely devoid of loys. The one near catastrophe was a space programme called “Thunderbirds” that I saw somewhere and was instantly captivated by,

It wasn’t the programme that was the problem — it was the marketing pitch for model space ships that nearly claimed my soul. I was desperate to gain one.

But the parental bar on television extended (to its plastic offspring (both “out of the question” and “rubbish”). | had to be brave about it.

1 expect [ found solace in books, The Arthur Mee Encyclopedia could always be relied on if ideas or projects dried up. Fiction was it remains — an escape route from the terrors of board. ing school or the boredom of wet holidays. Books, above all, stretched the imagination, And it’s imagination, so often blighted by television, that is at the heart of the Dutton crusade.

from the strain of watching. The result is a presentation of life and people compressed into a discontinuous melange of images.

Much has been said about the addiction of children. As a pall-Uician my interest Is in the anaesthetising effect of television on political debate. Nowhere Is this worse than news shows that have, somehow, to sustain the flow of entertainment.

T have often bemoaned the corrosive effect of television reporting on the ability of a democratic society to lake issues ly, debate them, reflect on and manage to maintain healthy disagreement and debate,

One American critic has declared that the premises on which “Shows are based is that bite-sized is best, complexity must be avoided, nuances are dispensable, qualifications impede the simple message, visual stimulation is a substitute for thought and verbal precision is ronisn.” Recognise it?

Whatever your gripe with television, Denis Dulton’s revenge must give you heart.

In urging people to resign from the Couch Potato Society, the promot are trying to get New Zealanders to switch their televisions off for a week and do something else at night — explore the night sky with binoculars, learn 100 Maori words, knit a jersey, plan next summer’s holiday, learn a new recipe.

Needless to say this isn’t calculated to thrill TYNZ. They’ve already responded by rather primly telling the Library Association that they could be

. the hand that feeds them”, This remarkable claim is based on the premise that when a book is televised It’s much in demand at librari

Just before television tries to completely rewrite history, we might ask how they think literature survived before vision was around to “support” it,

All that is predictable enough. More disturbing is the sway television seems to hald over organisations you’d think would be right behind the strategy.

The Hillary Commission, rather incredibly, says that Turn Of is “not aa activity which will stir late physical leisure among an identified group”, More telling is the next sentence, “It would also be inappropriate In view of our relationship with bath ision network:

The Booksellers (who you’d have thought might have had the imagination to back the proposal) have limply expressed sympathy but no tangible support,

In fact, the organisers aren’t getting a lot of support. | suppose if you’re worried about the next cut-price advertising deal, or getting yourself ravished or ravaged by Mr Ralston, you’ll be spooked.

1’m hoping, however, there is a rich, eccentric individual out there who is prepared to help. The idea is too quirky (and possibly quixotic) for the bureaucratic or corporate mind, But for anyone still able to communicate, read and fantasise, it’s a piece of Iconoclasm that should be Irresistible.

As one who has never been in the audience ratings, my assistance will be somewhat problematic, Hil be a case of staying turned off, But for thousands of households It should be an act of collective defiance in exploring the world beyond the bean pag. Like the festival, it may just galvanise us out of our rut. People needn’t feel freaky - there is strength in numbers.

Who knows, television viewing may yet carry a health warning?