I didn't literally cut it. It's still attached, as a matter of fact. It's just turned off. I called the cable TV company and said I wanted to "discontinue service." This pleasant female voice asked me why. I paused, wondering if I should go into my diatribe or opt for quick and simple. Go on about all those channels of trash--just zapping through them felt like trying to find my way out of a psychopath's mind? Or the fact that my bill has tripled in just the past several years, rising faster than even the healthcare index? Or that I hate their insipid ads, and grind my teeth every time they send me oversized junkmail, which I was obviously paying for with my tripled fee?
She saved me by saying, "Not Using? I have to check off something." I went for that. She was surprisingly nice. (I'm told you usually get a sales pitch.) She said that on the date service was cancelled, "you won't have to be home, you have no equipment to return, and you will receive no more bills." "That last bit," I said, "those are the magic words."
That was about a month ago. Except for my college years when I didn't have a set where I lived, I have been connected to television since I was four years old. We were early adopters, near Pittsburgh, which pioneered a lot of broadcasting history. I remember seeing a tiny round TV screen built into a radio. I remember waiting all day for the fifteen minutes of broadcast, which would be a program about ice trays in refrigerators. One of my earliest memories is a Saturday morning watching Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy. The bad guys took Dick Tracy's gun. But he outsmarted them. He had another gun. I was impressed.
I could go on--snow and test patterns through the early days of cable, when ours played Stormy Weather four times a day. But it's all gone now.
And now I see that I've accidentally joined a trend! It's called Zero TV, and it's growing. I'm not that tech savvy though. I can watch YouTube on my computer screen but I still want to look at the old TV from a TV chair or couch, and hooking that up requires...well, it's complicated.
For now I'm happy with DVD rentals (we lost one prime rental store but there are still two more at walking distance) and Netflix, and especially my DVDs (and I can buy more with all the money I'm saving!), and something I suspect not many of the trendy Zero TV folks have: VHS tapes and a VCR to play them on.
For years I not only bought VHS (often used from video stores etc.) but taped off the TV madly: from PBS stuff to my favorite network shows, to sports events, Bill Moyers interviews, all kinds of docus and above all, movies. I even rigged up a way to bypass most blocks and tape from rental store tapes and DVDs. Now I might even watch them.
Sure, the movies don't look that great--but I have some that are hard or even impossible to find in other forms. It's surprising how much of Book TV is archived online, but PBS is less reliable. And I have the complete Ronald Harwood theatre series (All the World's A Stage) ---libraries don't even have that.
So since my TV became zero I started off by watching some $1 DVDs I bought years ago but never got around to watching, like three early episodes of the real Lone Ranger (one with DeForest Kelley as guest star) and the Danny Thomas sitcom Make Room for Daddy, the best part of which are the commercials--for Philip Morris cigarettes ("Outstanding--and they are mild") and the new 1955 Dodge. Which reminds me--NO MORE COMMERCIALS!!!
I started through a stash of Doctor Whos of the Tom Baker era, with maybe too many promos for WQEX (Sweet little 16) in Pittsburgh in the late 80s. Wish I'd taped more from the other Doctors! Unfortunately even these are incomplete--I recorded them with a timer that was apparently off. So I was quite happy to get some Tom Baker Doctor Who DVDs for my birthday--the Key to Time series, with the beautiful Mary Tamm as the female Time Lord Romana. And lots of extras, including commentaries by Tom and Mary---they have little to say about the shows but Tom Baker is such a strange man, and Mary Tamm has since passed on, so these are little privileged moments of just hearing them chat.
And I really don't miss the political shows. In fact, I don't miss anything. I suppose if the Giants were playing better I'd miss baseball, but I have become reacquainted with the way I first experienced major league baseball: the radio.
I expect that someday I'll want to watch Hulu or whatever on a big screen. I suppose Blu-Ray isn't out of the question someday. But for now, I'm trendy, even if I'm coming at it from the wrong end.
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