Footage of a Man Dropping a Potato

I just watched a Channel 4 documentary called How to Retire at 40. Wow. I recommend watching it, not because it’ll tell you how to retire at 40, but to because it’s a useful reminder of how bad regular television can be.

Aside from the occasional digital box set (Mr Robot, Twin Peaks) and cherry-picked YouTube show (Best of the Worst, Binging with Babish), I’ve not consumed much in the way of telly over the past decade. This is because television is WOMBAT and, unless you genuinely love it, a distraction from the good life. There are better, cheaper, more intelligent ways of doing nothing.

In this programme, a trio of grinning, boggle-eyed presenters who speak up-and-down and up-and-down patronise the audience and their interviewees and give something like 10% content to 90% waffle — intros, recaps, rhetoric, point-laboring, commercial break, establishing shots of Wolverhampton and footage of a man dropping a potato. The actual message (that we “super save” or “trend spot” to escape the rat race) is so cursory as to be barely useful at all.

There’s a great moment when one of our gurning tellyfolk asks a young business owner how quickly she made her seed capital through crowdfunding (possibly crowdcube, though we’re never told). The answer is nine days, to which the presenter says something like “I’m really sorry, I’m going! Because this is a waste of my time, working in television!” She says it as a joke when she should have said it in earnest. And then done it.

Never forget the bad old days. Escapologists should try getting a bus during the rush-hour commute every so often or eating at Pizza Hut or, in this case, watching television. Just to remind ourselves that shunning these relatively normal pastimes is far from missing out. FOMO be damned!

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