Pointless?

The problem with declaring with a new blog that you’re going to say ‘enough is enough’ is that you actually have to follow through.

So here we go.

The first thing that there is more than enough of in my little life is TV.

Now I’m not a fanatic, not a TV fundamentalist.  I don’t spend four hours a night in front of the tellybox but there is still too much TV in my life.

Myself and the wife realised this a while ago but no matter how much we tried to cut down on staring into the screen in the corner of the room we never seemed to make much of an impact. So, in a bold move, we took the thing into the ‘other room’ (every house should have one).  What a difference: The living room was more spacious, it was brighter (no black box looming in the corner) and it was quieter - although to be fair the main reason the living room was quieter was because we’d all gone into the ‘other room’ to watch telly. Fail.

‘What’s the big problem with TV anyway’ you might ask.  Good question. It’s not all bad. There’s important stuff like ‘News at 10’, informative stuff like ‘Antiques Roadshow’, inspiring stuff like, ‘George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces’, funny stuff like ‘Would I Lie To You’, Holy stuff like ‘The Bible’ and darn right fabulous entertainment like, ‘Sherlock’.  But there’s also even better stuff that’s a hundred times worse, shows that you could watch all day and never be bored and yet never satisfied. One show in particular epitomises this genre – ‘Pointless’

Pointless is possibly the most perfectly pitched piece of television ever.  It’s tea-time viewing with a gentle yet grown up sense of humour. It’s a proper quiz that doesn’t take itself too seriously and it’s hosted by the terribly posh and awfully funny Alexander Armstrong and the extremely tall winner of Heat Magazine’s’ weird crush of 2011, Richard Osman. I love it.

Pointless is, the in the words of Marshall Crenshaw, ‘My favourite waste of time’.  But I know deep down inside that it really is a waste of time, or at least, watching too much of it would be.  If I watched an episode of pointless five days a week until I was 72, I would have been watching it for 468,000 minutes, that’s 7,800 hours or 325 days. Almost a year of my life spent watching TV if I only watch one 45 minute programme seven days a week – and I watch far more than that!

So it’s clear to me that I watch too much, but where is the line?  Well in order to find out how much TV I need, I’m going to cut it out all together for a week to see what I miss. That means no Pointless, no Would I lie to You, no Grey’s Anatomy, no Revenge, no Mrs Brown’s Boys, no MoTD, no Buzzcocks, no DVD’s and no catch-up either (I’m not even going to watch this week’s shows next week, if you know what I mean).  That’s midnight on Sunday 13^th to midnight on Sunday 20^th. If this doesn’t sound like a big deal to you then why not join me.  Think of the things we could accomplish instead. I could finish that book, get those odd-jobs done around the house, go for long walks on the beach, I might even be able to squeeze in a conversation with the wife!

I’ll miss Richard and Alexander of course (and I don’t even want to mention what the prospect of not watching Match of the Day feels like) but it’s only for a week and it might just do me some good!

Follow along on twitter to see if I survive or join in the conversation using #enough2014.