THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603100039
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Now that sex and violence on TV are about to be zapped by the mighty V-chip, we could use a few more screening gizmos.
How about, say, a D-chip to screen out dumbness. Or an I-chip to blip the idiots who pop up on daytime talk shows. And while we're at it, maybe a W-chip to zap anything that's a complete waste of time.
Yeah, yeah, I know. We'd be left with Barney, that spongy dinosaur, and ``Jeopardy!'' (Though, come to think of it, the D-chip might render extinct the purple dino, and if there's ever an N-chip, for screening out nerds, ``Jeopardy!'' goes to the boneyard.)
If I sound a little disillusioned about the video that's beamed into my house, it's because my boss recently made me watch 16 hours of not-ready-for-prime-time television. I watched four hours of TV a day for four days before falling to the floor, begging for mercy.
Please do not try this without proper supervision and a bottle of aspirin. It can be brutal.
The point was to find out what kids can watch on TV in the afternoons and early evening. At first, I thought, swell. Turn on the tube. Settle back on the sofa. Get paid to watch TV. What's not to like?
I figured I'd be a little indignant about steamy sex scenes and gratuitous violence, but what I didn't expect was the number of times I had to run screaming from the room. Not to protect my tender eyes from violence, mind you, but to shield myself from something far more insidious: dumb people on TV.
I'm not even talking about fictional characters like Bart Simpson, who calls his dad ``Homer Sexual,'' har, har, har. No, I'm talking about real people who go on national TV for reasons I cannot understand.
Take the women who went on the Jenny Jones talk show to gab about summer romances from years past. Jenny next brought out the guys the girls were talking about.
The fellows came bumbling out on stage all geeky-looking in straw hats and Hawaiian shirts. The girls giggled; the guys guffawed. Then there was some clumsy hand-holding while Jenny asked questions like, ``Well, how do you feel? Does he still make your heart pound? Are you still in love?''
Meanwhile, the entire viewing audience had to be screaming the questions they really wanted Jenny to ask: ``YOU'RE ON NATIONAL TV, YOU IDIOTS!!! Why did you agree to this? What were you thinking? Were you born with a brain?''
Well, maybe it was only me screaming like that. (Hey, do I get paid overtime for watching talk shows all the way to the end?)
And then there were the shows like ``Cops'' and ``Real Stories of the Highway Patrol,'' which gave me more of society's creme de la creme: Shirtless man running through highway traffic. Woman dressed only in a blanket saying her boyfriend just slugged her in the face. Drunk cursing an officer for telling her not to curse.
Stop! I can't take any more. Where do these people come from? Get me to another planet. (OK, OK, I'll do some real work for free, if you'll just let me turn off the television. Or at least switch to ``ER.'')
But I kept watching, marking my sex and violence charts, taking note of the use of drugs or alcohol. At the end of my TV marathon, I was struck more by the mindlessness, the dumbness, and the sheer wastefulness of TV rather than the sex and violence.
But if Jenny Jones ever has a segment titled ``Women Who Scream at their TV Sets,'' I'm in like a V-chip. by CNB