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For two years, I watched a minimal of 24 TV exhibits each week. From Strictly Come Dancing to The Crown, BBC 4 documentaries on canals and the newest ITV crime thrillers – I’d park myself in entrance of my display screen each day, sit again and eat all of it.
Extra than simply an obsessive interest, this was my job on the Guardian’s TV desk as one among their preview writers. It had all the trimmings of a childhood fantasy: I used to be getting paid to observe exhibits all day, weeks earlier than they got here out to the general public, then writing up pithy summaries for the paper. My youthful self would have been surprised by the prospect of his favorite pastime being was work – maybe all these years he spent watching Neighbours after faculty and Eastenders within the night had been lastly paying off. With the telly for firm, work might be extra enjoyable than shuffling paper in an workplace, accumulating your paycheck and residing for the weekend.
And it was superb. Really, watching TV for a job felt like being let in on one among life’s biggest jokes, a dreamy existence marred solely by the prospect of getting to awkwardly skip by way of intercourse scenes whereas viewing exhibits on my huge monitor in the midst of the day within the Guardian’s open-plan places of work.
When the pandemic arrived, although, issues modified. With TV already occupying a lot area in my life, as soon as I used to be despatched dwelling for the foreseeable future, it grew to become all-consuming.
The glut of the TV schedules poured forth: Regular Folks, I Could Destroy You, It’s A Sin, Neighbours (nonetheless), all offering leisure to maintain me occupied whereas I slowly melted into the sagging cloth of my couch. Since I reside alone, these exhibits grew to become greater than only a easy distraction – screens grew to become a significant bridge to the skin world, and the Covid-free narratives on TV provided an escape from the chaos of actuality.
But, because the saying goes, an excessive amount of of 1 factor is nice for nothing. With exhibits for work and exhibits for pleasure, the TV known as to me like a paralysing temptation within the nook of the room, providing an opportunity to take a look at and channel-surf into oblivion. And as soon as the world started reopening once more into the intimacy of real-life interactions, bringing with it the nervousness of adjusting from our “new regular” again into the previous one, the TV more and more felt like a security blanket with which to keep away from change.
Change, although, is critical. Whereas everybody round me was discovering their manner again into the unpredictability of the skin world, I started to see that life couldn’t preserve present throughout the protected confines of my flat. To get me on the market would imply letting go of my security display screen.
The aware uncoupling has now begun, since I left my job on the Guardian TV desk late final yr to pursue freelance writing full-time. Twenty 4 exhibits every week, I realised, had turn into much less of a fantasy and extra of a slog that sucked the pleasure from viewing for its personal sake.
Transferring into 2023, I’ll now be resisting the urge to observe something and the whole lot whereas I make money working from home and as an alternative tackle a brand new adage to information my habits: high quality over amount.
I’ll be laying aside the binge watches and following beneficial sequence extra slowly to let their tales sink in – realistically, that can imply an episode a day slightly than a season over a weekend. And between these viewing hours there’s a world to discover – time to reconnect with family and friends, get again to reside gigs and exhibits, and hopefully make some tales of my very own which can be simply as tantalising and thrilling as these escapist onscreen fictions I as soon as lived for.
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