Watching/Not Watching

Do you ever find yourself watching something on TV and wondering why you are sitting through it and, more importantly, why you don't just go and do something else?  It happens to me all the time.  Right now, I'm sat on the sofa watching The Lovers! on Talking Pictures TV.  I have no idea why I've sat through it - it isn't a particularly good film and I don't even remember the 1970-71 TV sitcom it is more or less a prequel to, (I only recall seeing an episode of it when the series was repeated on Channel Four in the late nineties).  To be sure, the leads (Richard Beckinsale and Paula Wilcox) are engaging enough and the script is fitfully witty, plus, it provides a fascinating snap shot of early seventies Manchester, but it is nothing special and drags badly.  Yet I sat through it all (it has just ended).  OK, I know that there was nothing else to watch on TV, (another reason I won't pay for satellite or cable TV - if I can't find anything to watch among the seventy plus channels on Freeview, why would I pay for the privilege of having an even wider selection of channels I'm not interested in?), but that really isn't an excuse, as TV isn't the be all and end all of home entertainment.  The only excuse I can come up with is that I did need something mindless as a sort of moving wallpaper while I thought about some new health issues which have come up.

Yet the truth is that, as previously alluded to, I have form for this sort of viewing.  It goes right back to my childhood.  When I was a kid I used to sit through programmes because there was something on afterward that I wanted to watch.  Quite why I didn't just go off and do something else until my programme came on, I don't know.  Perhaps I was afraid that I'd get carried away with whatever else it was I might have done and miss the show I wanted to watch, (these were the days before we had catch up TV).  Or maybe I was afraid that, if I left my post in front of the TV, someone would commandeer it and change channels, (I come from a large family of squabbling siblings).  Whatever the reason, I ended up sitting through many, many episodes of Jack Hargreaves' Out of Town.  To be fair, it probably helped me build up my stamina with regard to boredom - enduring hour after hour of Jack Hargreaves has left me able to endure boredom of the most stultifying levels.  But even when I was older, I would still sit through stuff because, basically, I was too lazy to get up and do something else.  In my early twenties, for instance, I sat through every episode of the Victorian Kitchen Garden on BBC2 because someone else wanted to watch it and I couldn't be arsed to get out of my armchair.  The worst thing is that I don't remember a thing about Victorian kitchen gardens, so I didn't even learn anything from my self-inflicted ordeal.