Television in the Eighties
But, there's always a but...
But TV didn't reach its maturity without breaking a few eggs, to mix my metaphors. Our attention span has decreased - if something doesn't grab our attention on TV within a few minutes we have a tendency to flick the remote on to another channel. If we don't like what we see (and let's face it, watching people starving to death in a distant land isn't pleasant) we can avoid it by hopping channels to re-runs of I Love Lucy.
Our health has suffered. We are less fit and more overweight than any generation in the history of the world. Whereas we used to do active things, we tend to sit in and watch TV. Fifty years ago we might well have participated in a sport. Today, we watch it on TV.
Our conversation has suffered. We are less well read. We have lost the art of talking to each other.
There is a list as long as your arm of different grievances that could be leveled at TV. It's only been since the 80's that I believe we've really been able to tell what effect the invention has had on our society.
And TV suffers too
And strangely enough, TV has not been immune from the enormous changes that had happened in its own industry by the 1980s. Where once there were two or three channels, now there were four, or five or 15 or 40. The old monopoly of (in America) CBS, NBC or ABC was broken by the introduction of cable TV, and new networks started to turn up. Britain's old duopoly of BBC and ITV was changed by the introduction of BBC2 (in the 60's) and Channel 4 in the 70's. And, the introduction of cheap video recorders meant we were no longer tied to the dictatorship of the channel programmers - we could watch what we wanted when we wanted to.
And that changed the way we saw TV. The days of conversations that began with the words "Did you see...." were numbered. Because the answers now were often "No, I taped it to watch tonight, so don't tell me what happened" (A sure-fire conversation killer). Or sometimes the answer is "I was watching re-runs of Star Trek on cable". What had been, for three decades, a community activity had now become a solitary one again.
Today, there are few TV events that capture the world on TV
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