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Is it possible to be both a television snob and a television junkie?

Is it possible to be both a television snob and a television junkie? Why start a column with a question so obviously loaded? Can we just get on with it and stop asking questions? I am, undeniably, a television junkie.
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Is it possible to be both a television snob and a television junkie? Why start a column with a question so obviously loaded? Can we just get on with it and stop asking questions?

I am, undeniably, a television junkie. Have been since the first flickering black & white box came into my life when I was but a wee lad. My fascination wandered into hypnotic obsession and beta-state mesmerization and caused my parents no end of grief. They were, even though they didn’t express it too often, certain I would grow up to be a shiftless layabout due largely to my ability to sit for hours doing absolutely nothing but staring at ever-changing light.

It gives them no succor in their twilight years to know how right they were… if for the wrong reasons. I can’t blame my shiftlessness or layabout ways on television. Skiing’s to blame for that. And while I became addicted to the pastime too late in life and with stunningly insufficient prowess to become a ‘professional’ athlete, I’ve tried to make the most out of a disreputable lifestyle by eking out the credentials to, in moments of overreaching, call myself a ski writer. It excuses if not explains a lot, carrying with it a whiff of education and a hint of work ethic.

I don’t think I could pull off the same trick with television though. Even when I read some writer’s very reasoned, even learned analysis of something on the small screen, I’m suspect. What fully-functioning grown-up would really be a TV critic? I mean it’s one thing to subject yourself to a 120-foot hill in Minnesota to write a ski story about it with the hope that if you do, your editor will send you someplace better; it’s another thing altogether to sit through a couple of hours of Survivor and then add insult to injury by gamely trying to write something highbrow about it in the hope you’ll, what? Get to write something about a better reality(sic) show? In the first instance you can have fun on snow, if only in 30-second intervals. In the second… pass the novocaine.

But I like television a lot. I like the soothing light it casts in a darkened room. I like the immediacy and disjointed reality of channel surfing. I like the gratifying surprise when I finally stumble across something interesting and unexpected. I like the unbridled nostalgia when everything goes black & white and I realize I’m into timeless and ancient mode with a particularly good and surprising episode of The Twilight Zone . And I’m learning to really enjoy the ancillary inactivity of dropping off to sleep on the sofa, finger glued to the channel-up button, the TV doing endless laps while I snooze in blissful REM until the remote slips from my hand and I’m rudely awakened by an ad for Country Classics, Volume 27.

I especially enjoy satellite TV. I got satellite a number of years ago after an unfortunate incident of hubris made it impossible for me to continue to pay, in good conscience, my local cable provider. It was a revelation. Not only did I suddenly have a clear signal, one without ghostly apparitions and whiteouts during rainstorms, I had digital sound and channels from coast to coast to coast. With a dozen CBC channels from PEI to the Yukon, I could watch The National anytime between 5:30 and 11 p.m. Finally, I felt, I was beginning to get my tax money’s worth. It was still disappearing down the same rathole of crappy CBC programming but now I could at least choose the time I wallowed in the crap.

But the downside of satellite is the Olympics™ and extravaganzas of its ilk. Instead of stumbling across Olympic™ coverage once or twice a lap, I get mired in the several dozen channels covering it for most of the day. Channel-surfing becomes more like swamp wading. The whole effect is very Alice in Wonderland. Especially when the sliding sports or skiing is featured.

Have I seen this footage before? Hard to know. One luger looks pretty much like every other luger as they slide down the SEVENTY-NINE MILLION DOLLAR sliding centre. That, by the way, would be a big enough number in Italian Lira to take up the rest of this column.

And as much as I appreciate the grace and raw power of ski racers, it’s hard to know whether you’re watching today’s combined or yesterday’s Super G. It just seems to go on forever. The only thing that remains constant is Canada’s winning Pewter for a fourth-place finish.

Even the repetitive swamp has its high points though. It was incredible to watch over and over again as Jeff Bean’s skis flew off his boots and headed skyward as if powered by their own rockets while he had the grace, training and presence of mind to continue with his aerial routine and more or less stick the landing. That’ll surely show up on the highlight reel for the Torino Olympics™. It woulda been a true Olympic™ moment if Jeff could have rallied to medal in aerials and cap a career of bizarre near misses. But it wasn’t in the cards for Mr. Bean.

And it’s been fun to watch the reruns of Lindsay Jacobellis snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with her backside method that ended badly and cost her the gold medal in boardercross. It would have been even more entertaining if she’d stayed true to the spirit of snowboard culture and punched NBC’s Bob Costas in the nose when he wouldn’t get off her case. Piss off, Bob. If you knew dick about boarding you’d know style trumps gold every time, even in the greedfest that is the Olympics™. And in case you weren’t paying attention, Bob, NBC’s pitiful coverage is running a distant third to crapola like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars , ya loser.

Whatever nationalistic pride one might feel about CBC’s coverage as opposed to NBC’s, it was still pathetic to watch the vultures try to scare up scandal when Canadian-turned-Aussie Dale Begg-Smith nudged less hyphenated Canadian Marc-Andre Moreau off the podium with two exquisite runs through the mogul course. While containing everything scandalous to Canadian culture – a self-made millionaire while still in his teens turns his back on his own country when the hidebound bureaucracy of a mismanaged sports body tells him "It’s our way or the highway." – the whole thing fizzled into the nonevent it really was when no one at the national broadcaster was willing to look beyond Dale’s extravagant lifestyle and ask the CFSA tough questions.

But it’ll be over soon and I can go back to pretty much ignoring all the non-news shows on CBC. Next time around I won’t even need ‘em. I’ll be able to watch it live… assuming I haven’t been run out of town or voted off the island by then.