Induction over - my take on my week
So my busy week of induction is done. Being adult learners, we’re a pain in the butt, talking over the lecturers and derailing the lessons. I’m sure we exasperated at least one lecturer who seemed rather tired out by the whole exercise of having to explain his course module. The amount of students attending our induction seemed to dwindle pretty fast after the first day which was a shame.
I know what my choices are for this semester. Screenwriting and creative non-fiction. The screenwriting module sounds interesting and I was really excited by it because I’ve already tried my hand at it and I’d love to learn more. However, one thing really bothered me about my fellow students. Lovely as they are, it really bugs me that our session was filled with sweeping statements about how TV is awful and full of rubbish. One student said he didn’t bother watching TV.
No one ever says such sweeping statements about how literature is full of rubbish and garbage despite much evidence to the contrary. Katie Price is an author who can outsell the entire Man Booker’s nominations list with one novel; E.L. James’s badly written erotica has made her a multi-millionaire; Dan Brown’s entire literary output. There is plenty of rubbish being consumed by readers in vast quantities and yet they seem to be conveniently forgotten about. They do not define ‘literature’ as a creative art form because we associate books with Dickens, Bronte, Amis, [insert your favourite author here]. TV, however, is ‘lesser’. It isn’t studious. You don’t need to sit in a library. We watch TV in our living rooms and bedrooms. You relax and ‘switch off’. There is something passive about the taking in of visual information despite the complex processes taking place in our eyes and brains.
I love watching TV. I’m probably the last of a generation of people who grew up watching TV. I picked my choices carefully and scoured the TV pages for the new and different. I learned a lot from TV. I loved the children’s TV that I grew up with. Wonderfully weird and strange programmes like Trapdoor, Dangermouse, Pigeon Street, the Wombles and Sesame Street to children’s drama like Grange Hill and Byker Grove.
I remember in an R.E. lesson, the teacher asked the class who the enemies were against America in the Cold War. From seeing the Russian baddies in Cold War movies on TV, I was the only person to give the right answer which surprised the teacher who expected this part of relatively recent history to be more commonly known.
I remember talking excitedly at school about a new American drama called ER that I had watched the night before. There was a new comedy called ‘Friends’ that my small coterie of fellow TV enthusiasts and I enjoyed which later exploded in popularity.
TV can be as entertaining, exciting and informative as you want it to be depending on what you choose. If you choose garbage, you’ll watch garbage.
You’d think that being in a screenwriting class would be the one place where you wouldn’t get judgement for saying unashamedly that you love TV (and film) and get to geek out over the machinations of the process.
But no. We have people with no respect for the form thinking that tossing off a script is easier than writing a stage play or composing a piece of poetry.
So, I love TV. Just don’t expect me to say it in a screenwriting class.