The Malaysian Insider

OCT 28 — Reading to young children. It is what every book on child rearing says you have to do. Have you tried it? As luck would have it, my wife has brought literature to life for my four-year-old daughter. By reading of course, and she (both the former and the latter) enjoys the written word.

My two-year-old son, on the other hand, is mesmerised by the mere sight of the visages that populate the Disney channel. But I say he is a child and I hope he will come around to books. Even, might I say, pop-up versions.

Many will bet against that, but if you really have an idea of what is on television today, my bet is books will make a massive comeback, in our lifetime. Apart from taxes, it is a guarantee.

And the evidence for that is what we pay to see on television today. Chat shows come upon the board first. Oprah and Ellen bringing to us the life of the fat and wealthy and then they have a moment for the poor and depraved. All these people are willing to display themselves, sleeve and all, to one billion people. Warts, venereal or otherwise. But some of them are real people who have bled their hearts to the world from which Oprah and Ellen make the small matter of, well, money.

Not on my Nellie.

Next comes the reality show. And this is how it works. Live a normal life until an advert comes out in some paper that invites you to win a million dollars. You submit your application and are invited to a show, with such neutral names as “Big Brother” or “Losing the Fat” or “Who is the Fat Bastard”. All of which should tell you that public humiliation is if not around the corner, steaming steadily upon two tracks, in your direction.

And yet people do it. It is hardly surprising that there are also people who watch. It must be the love of observing other people humiliated. Human nature enjoys the discomfort of others, because it just makes you feel better. It is really that simple, for you can sit there in your couch weighing 150 kilos and say… “Look at that Fat Bastard…, who is that idiot, I would never have exposed myself to that……”

For the love of god, I wonder what it is that possesses people to humiliate themselves in such ventures. Fame and money I suppose. But could we be spared the incentive to enjoy it. Yes and please sir. Television is today, in the words of Judge John Deed in a recent and mildly interesting British series, the pursuit of the talentless by the mindless.

“Blackadder”, “Poirot”, “West Wing”, “Office” … to name but a few series of the past decade that have made television worth watching. “Fawlty Towers”, “Yes Minister” and “Monty Python”, things of the past, to be savoured by those of us that are waning, when television engaged mind as oppose to base instinct.

But the finest outcome that can come from this is the return of books. The return of having a choice of what you read, because every bookshop provides that in a way that no remote control can. It empowers you, in the truest manner that choice always does: you never pay for what you do not want. Which modern television and government never does.

And if television continues in its cheap and rabid acquisition of the humiliation of people, it can only lie upon us to give our children the choice that allows them to straddle that. Choices that are not thrust upon us by satellite television and the bills that follow.

For whatever primeval instinct today’s television entices, the choice of being able to read what you wish is, in the terms of a reality show, something worth being humiliated for.

So I thank you television, would you believe it, in the 21st century, for returning us to books. And thanks to you, we shall all devour them …

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