Breeding resentment

In the middle of last month we were supposed to have remembered one Henry Labalme.

Like Anna Jarvis, who was responsible for instituting Mother's Day when she observed the anniversary of her mother's death, supporters of this (other) American wish that his idea will take root the world [wherever there is television] over.

If you have ever found yourself zapping away disgustedly, from every channel you try, after an average of 6.1 seconds, you will appreciate more fully what it's all about, although the original spur was the perturbation Mr Labalme felt when he totted up the hours children spent watching television, and then compared them with relevant factors such as predisposition to violence, creativity, peer interaction and being overweight.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned viewers will keep zapping away even when lesser mortals would have lost hope of ever connecting with something onscreen; and that's where dependency kicks in.

Just as, in my childhood, it used to be a status symbol to give the Schaub-Lorenz pride of pIace in the sitting room, today it is considered a necessity to own at least a set per resident, in a warped understanding of the phrase 'freedom of expression'.

The rumpus room, the study, and the living room have lost their real names and become just another "television room".

We fail to realise that this newfangled god is mainly regurgitating cud from aeons past, hiding it under fancy names like Welsh Rarebit when it's really good old cheese on toast.

When TVM showed Triq Wahda, people called it an amalgamation of Guzè Chetcuti's Minn Tarf sa Tarf tat-Triq and the then immensely popular Neighbours.

Nowadays, we have Ghada Jisbah Ukoll, with a macramé of characters busy living in and turning out one another's pockets. I take it that there are not many wives who are grateful to the girl with whom their husband would have had an affair but of course this is a 'positive' series, and so the gratitude obtains because now that the affair is over, the marriage is stronger.

Susan Dey had grown up from The Partridge Family and graduated into Grace Van Owen of L.A. Law. And then Ally McBeal came along and used the unisex washrooms of her firm and nobody said, as they had for the first series mentioned, that it had made applications to law schools turn sharply up. But they did indicate that the cream of legal eagles must be making enough money to warrant their looking as good as the cast on this show.

Over the years there have been a spate of series centering on the same topics - the police force, detective agencies, extended families, media-related environments, science fiction, including the unexplained, re-created according to the authors' imagination and autobiographical tendencies. Twin Peaks was considered an innovation in cult viewing simply because it was the "what if" side of Ruth Rendell.

Stand-up comics split, amoeba-like, into trios and whole teams, milking sacred cows - but not in Malta - for all they are worth. In the end, even if you have a one-eyed monster blinking away in every corner of every room, there may be nothing worthwhile watching on any of them; and that is the type of logic extant in those who were interviewed by Jack Mingo for his book The Official Couch Potato Handbook. Paolo Bonolis imitates Lou Bondî. Jay Leno is a star, but then so is Jerry Springer.

And now PBS has been restructured. When William Hurt was wooing Jane Eyre and Albert Marshall had just been made general manager at PBS, we had all heaved a sigh of relief because we had hoped that he would give a good drubbing to anyone whose socks were not pulled up good and proper.

But that was all a part of the myth that is television - just as we were asked to believe that a book editor (Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction) and a construction worker (Jennifer Beals, Flash-dance) live in lofts as big as hangars.

Jean-Luc Godard had punned it in a nutshell when he said that the screen's pseudo-reality was not the right image but just an image (a little is lost in the translation).

In the past, PBS has alternated between winning prestigious awards such as the one for Mediterraneo, and obscene innuendo masquerading as fact in programmes that pass for news. And then we wonder why in a certain nation, film stars are as likely as not to become politicians if they want to stick their neck out for a particular party.

Television is hypnotic; we remember the time Giucas Casella, as a guest on the Late Night Show in Germany, put a studio audience in a trance and they, like many viewers, were unable to snap out of it when he clapped his hands for the regulation three times.

Fabrizio Fazio had started something (imitated for a short while on a local channel) that had on-air zapping done for us, complete with home-grown, often personal, comments about programmes and participants.

This was taking the "television-thinks-for-you" exercise a bit too far.

But we can all break the television habit; we can even write a critique column, if we are so inclined, when the boob tube has been out of order all week and we have no desire to mend it although it is the only one in t'he home. And this without mentioning, even once, Beryl Cook's Bosom Pals or the other meaning of 'intimate' (i.e. inner body workings) of C.S.I.