I Gave Up TV for a Week - Here’s What Happened
Abandoning my wife's only friend
#16. A Week Without TV
Millionaires don’t watch TV.
According to one study, most of them spend less than an hour a day melting into the boob tube, compared to about three hours a day for the rest of us, the plebs.
Well, I’d love to be a millionaire - and I never knew the solution could be so simple!
I’d always wanted to bin the tele box anyway. Sometime around Boris Johnson telling me I couldn’t celebrate Christmas with my family in case we caught the flu, I gave up on live TV altogether. I just took the cable and threw it away. I haven’t missed it at all. I’d wanted to go further and nix the set entirely.
I realised one evening, laying supine before Married at First Sight, that I don’t watch TV at night because I’m tired, I’m tired because I watch TV. Some things in life give you energy and some things take it away. TV is stupefying and stultifying and pointless – but mind you, so is crack and that’s pretty popular too. Sometimes you just want to switch your brain off.
I’ve tried to kick the habit many times over the years (TV, not crack), but it’s not been easy, especially when your addiction is a folie à deux. The last time I put a television into storage it broke, screen crushed within the ottoman, and my wife in tears.
‘You don’t care about it,’ she cried, ‘And when I’m old and broken you’ll discard me too.’
She has a strong emotional attachment to the TV. ‘It was my only friend growing up,’ she confessed, after a little probing (non-sexual). So, being a considerate husband, I was kinder this time, taking the remote and hiding it where she’d never look – a yoga mat.
Almost immediately I wished she had not agreed to it, because, although it was important to reclaim my mind from the gogglebox, I did also really want to watch Gogglebox. What else was there to do on a Friday night? Or any night for that matter?
Well, I read books, I wrote stories, I played the guitar. I bonded with my son. I bonded with my wife, too. One evening, we listened to a sound bath meditation together and then watched the clouds slope by the window. Another, we shared songs that were meaningful to us; her, Can’t Help Falling In Love, me, Heaven is a Halfpipe. Some evenings we just lay on the sofa talking. We played ‘Soup or Sandwich?’ (Hot dog? Sandwich. Milkshake? Soup.).
Without the mind-numbing effects of TV, I ate mindfully. I noticed that the amount I normally eat is too much, so much that it makes me irritable. In the past, I would have switched off the feeling with Love is Blind. I also didn’t fancy a takeaway – without the TV to distract me, it just seemed artificial, greasy and nauseating (much like Love is Blind).
After each dinner, we tidied up the kitchen together; the house was much cleaner that week. Then, we’d go to sleep at a decent time. I sprung out of bed earlier than usual each morning.
I came to look forward to the evenings – to spending time with my family. I mean actually spending time with them.
Jasmine wasn’t enjoying it quite so much. She felt more anxious and struggled to sleep. Without the narcotic screen, she had to face her anxieties head-on. Every day she would ask me if I miss the TV and how am I getting on without it.
‘Fine,’ I would lie, and she wouldn’t say anything.
On the final day of the experiment, the king was being coronated. I was glad to miss it, to avoid the brainwashing. Instead, a schoolfriend joined us1, and we just talked for five hours. In the evening, I read Grimm fairy tales to Jasmine to calm her nerves. I told her the story of Hans the Gambler – foolhardy Hans, who just couldn’t quit his vice no matter how many chances God gave him, until finally God shattered his soul into a million fragments that went down and inhabited the gambling vagabonds of the Earth until this very day.
The next day, we reflected on our experiences – the podcasts, the books, the long conversations. The healthy meals and the decent bedtimes and the clean house.
‘It made me consider that maybe we should think about watching it a bit less, perhaps,’ she said.
Then I went to the yoga mat and retrieved the remote. Gogglebox was on.
What about you - could you go a week without TV?
By which I mean a friend I’ve known since school, not a friend that I, an adult, have, who currently goes to school.