There is a profound and subliminal ideology that unites all - and that ideology is the ideology of consumerism. Some people ideologically place themselves as fascists, some others support an anti-fascist ideology, but both of them, beyond their respective ideologies, have something in common - and that is the ideology of consumerism. Consumerism is what I consider the real neo-fascism. Now that I am able to draw comparisons, I understand something that would shock many, something that would even shock me ten years ago: the fact that neither poverty nor exploitation are the worst of evils. That is to say, man's greatest evil is neither poverty, nor exploitation but the loss of human individuality under the state of consumerism. Under a fascist regime one could go to jail. But now, going to jail is of no use whatsoever. Fascism propped itself up on the shoulders of Church and Army, which appear insignificant with comparison to television.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, in: Luis Racionero, Las Filosofias Del Underground, p.63

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives, "Spudding Out"

So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.

Raymond Chandler, Letter, 15 Nov. 1951 (published in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962).

In his lonely isolation, Morris turned instinctively for solace to the media.

David Lodge, Changing Places, p.69


                                                  *

I would like to quote the extant remains of a poem from a famous native poet:

T. S. Helot,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Gogglebox

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit amavit cras amet

Anon, Pervigilium Veneris

Let us go then you and I When the evening spreads out
Like a potato etherized upon a couch
Hence, in etherization, may commence holly communion
with the Couch Potato Union.

In the room women talk about Home and Away
Terry Christian, Chris Evans - with no dismay.

No! I'm not Prince Charles,
nor was I meant to be;
and I won't have a big wedding on TV.
I'm just an attendant horde, whose vision
Is espoused to the television.

In the room women talk about Brookside
Pamela Anderson, Take That - joking aside

I have measured out my life with visions of the telly
precious sights of pneumatic bliss
gazes in inter-embracement,
aphiloprogenitive
and opticopro-
philiac.

In the room women talk about Top of The Pops
Neighbours, Cantona - chewing on their lollipops

Do I dare eat a leech? Do I dare suck a nipple?
I shall were the tackiest union jack trousers
and jerk off upon a ripple.
I have seen the koine fornicating in the showers:
I do not think that they will take more than a tickle.

We have lingered by the chambers of the screen
By screen-girls wreathed with screen-weed red and brown
'Till human voices wake us, and we frown.


The above poem encapsulates the spiritual and transcendental essence of this alternative religion that imposes on its subjects such a demanding lifestyle. Few its followers, but inevitably pulchrum est paucorum hominum and that is that. But I will talk to you a bit about them. Opticoprophiles, or coggas (conscientious gogglebox appendages), as they preferred to call themselves, shared the common belief that the more vicariously one lived his life, the more virtuous and fruitful that life would be. They also believed that one could achieve an unbounded awareness of the cosmos, the so-called cosmic consciousness, provided he spent a few decades of diligent daily meditation using the word Brookside as a mantra. 'Oh God, give a man his daily Brookside/ so that he may learn to live aside' was one of their most oft-repeated prayers.
An extreme sect of this religion who called themselves Hare Brookshna would go about in the streets chanting this prayer, beating a drum and trying to proselytize others. But all their efforts were in vain: all prospective converts were at home,

... watching television.

                                                  *

Let us all now with one voice and one heart chant the holly song of the coggas:

GOD, TAKE AWAY OUR LEGS, OUR HANDS, OUR VISION
BUT DO NOT DEPRIVE US OF OUR TELEVISION!
FOR IN OUR BRAIN'S BRAVE NEW LAND WE SEE PLENTY OF SPACE FOR A TELL'Y'MPLANT!

                                                  *

For those of us finding Christmas just a teensy bit stressful, Santa had thoughtfully provided a spot of last-minute couch therapy.

The Times, 23 December 1996, Matthew Bond

Of course, one should not ignore the therapeutic value of television, it would not be an exaggeration to call it a medicine box for every known psychosomatic disorder, an emergency couch potato therapy easily administered without further social disruption. To quote the advice of a native given to a foreign girl in moments of depression:

you know... watch some crappy TV.

Indeed, what an advice!: A note of caution here:

Some distractors in themselves can perpetuate depression. Studies of heavy TV watchers have found that, after watching TV, they are generally more depressed than before they started!

Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p.73

                                                  *

It happened when I was sharing a flat with 4 other natives. One of them, Harry, I had never seen angry or heard swearing - that is until he realized that he couldn't find the 'remote'. Indeed, to lose the remote control is one of the major domestic disasters alongside the burning of a defrosted McCain Pepperoni pizza or the 'cooking' of a panful of water which has evaporated into extinction leaving a rather unpleasant smell of burnt metal...

And it was only the video remote; imagine what would have happened if it was the TV one!

                                                  *

After numerous infertile cerebrations I feel that I am getting at a gnosiological breakthrough, I think I have discovered serious clues on where the tortured, flagellated, deviated, stultified, etiolated, rummaged, eviscerated, repressed emotions of the natives have gone, in other words, I can give you the exact longitude and latitude (or should I say pixel) of their likely location:

Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.

Sir Robin Day, Financial Times, London, 8 November 1989

© Copyright by Spiros Doikas

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