At first the reason was financial. I preferred to use the balance between the monochrome and colour licence on books, and my weekly benefit entitlement was alone roughly equivalent to the cost of a monochrome television licence. Subsequently, I passed from being part of the "undeserving" to the "deserving poor", even though it was only caused by the authorities changed perception of me rather than any specific developments in my life. After I bought my first home computer in 2001, having ensured it did not have a TV card, time spent watching television rapidly declined. I do not bother with it at all now; the set has needed a new plug for the last eighteen months, but I have not managed to motivate myself to fix it or to get rid of the thing.
My dislike of television is partly a response to a misspent youth. My parents took The Sun when I was a child, with the result that my awareness of potential stimuli was restricted; being an only child with the life-long Asperger's Syndrome, which could not have been diagnosed then, were other reasons. I am certain watching too much television damaged my academic development. But trying to drastically reduce my dependence on popular culture when I had to resit O-levels in the early 1980s, which isolated me, helped lead to my first mental crisis in 1984. By then I was no longer considered ‘thick’; my schools had invariably placed me in the bottom or remedial class when they followed streaming. No doubt the notorious fixation on sex of The Sun when my male hormones were at their most rampant helped me to discover foreign language films quite early, it was a relief to find something similar occurred to one of my favourite bloggers. Now in my mid-forties, I am regularly irritated by my recall of forgotten television programmes from my youth when facts which are of more value to me now are difficult to recall with such ease.
The trivia which still fills my brain is useful in my work on Wikipedia, and interest in an unstressful pastime might well help motivate the young into an area which will help them gain a better formal education than I had, and a career. If the singularity of information technology leads to the reduction of peer pressure to fit in, that will help. As an anti-illiberal, I do not begrudge the pleasure other people gain from watching television, Peter Hitchens' persistent failure to recognise this obvious fact in his own tele-phobia is revealing, but my frustrated life course leads to my own personal animosity. Even so, Hitchens attack on colour television, in The Abolition of Britain, is particularly loopy.
Mark Lawson had a decent education, at UCL (University College, London), has a successful career, but still manages to come over as a complete ignoramus in a field where the competence of an arts journalist might be expected. Black and white were not only the "shades of early cinema" (he means "tonal range"); American colour films were in the minority until the mid-fifties and only became the majority elsewhere a decade later. If the excellent DVD releases of East European cinema by secondrun are any guide, colour films were scarce there until the beginning of the 1970s. Apparently, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon "set during the first world war – conforms to the belief among film directors that black-and-white stock lends historical authenticity". That is unlikely to be a widely held attitude; even historical films shot in black and white are a tiny minority. Colour is not completely "omitted" from Schindler's List, as he seems to think.
This passage is particularly underdeveloped:
But, except when the intention is to parody or invoke a type of movie from the bleached-out period – such as Young Frankenstein, Ed Wood or the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There – the use of the less popular stock can seem self-advertising or distracting. It can make the film seem less realistic, not more so, because viewers are even more aware than usual of the director's intervention.Lawson has an eight-hundred word limit for this article; this passage manages to leave a maddening number of things unresolved. Cannot realism be played with? Is realism the only quality a film can have? Isn't “self-advertising or distracting” a quality more common in garishly coloured pop videos and advertisements? Why should black and white over colour make viewers more “aware” of a director’s intentions? It is reductionist to say films are one or the other; they are many other things as well. Does Lawson ever venture into the avant-garde cinema where directorial intentions are more oblique? On the 1928 black and white film The Seashell and the Clergyman an internal report of the British Board of Film Censors (as it was then) made the infamous comment: "Apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable".
Lawson thinks artists "could reasonably point out that black and white are also colours". Well if you start out being thinking in terms of pigmentation, as Lawson does, this is a confusion with skin colour. Black and white play a negligible role on artists' colour wheels. He should try crafting his articles more.
Why do the press and broadcasters appoint people like Mark Lawson?
