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Grown-ups, as any child will tell you, are monstrous hypocrites, especially when it comes to television. It is to take their minds off their own telly-addiction that adults are so keen to hear and talk about the latest report on the effects of programs on children. Surely all that nonsense they watch must be desensitizing them, making them vicious, shallow, acquisitive, less responsible and generally sloppy about life and death. But no, not a scrap of convincing evidence from the sociologists and experts in the psyches of children. For many years now parents, teachers and newspaper editors have been disappointed by the various studies, and sociologists are beginning to fall into disrepute for failing to come up with the desired results. The latest report, " Popular TV and Schoolchildren" , perhaps more attuned to the authoritarian times in which we live, assumes greater moral leadership and hands out laurels and wooden spoons to TV shows and asserts, as educators should, the importance of having values. The kids, on the other hand, will no be switching off Kenny Everett now they have been told how sexist and trivial he is. (As if they didn’’t know! ) 66. ( ) The nation has lived with the box for more than 30 years now and has passed from total infatuation — revived temporarily by the advent of colour — to the present casual obsession which is not unlike that of the well-adjusted alcoholic. And now the important and pleasant truth is breaking, to the horror of program makers and their detractors alike, that television really does not affect much at all. 67. ( ) And if TV imparts little bad, there is no reason to think it does much good either. It has failed spectacularly to make our children more callous and violent, and it has failed by way of " Jackanory" or "Blue Peter" to forge a young nation of origami adepts, or dog handlers or builders of lawn mowers out of coat hangers and wire corks. Television turns out to be no great transformer of minds or society. We are not, en masse, as it was once predicted we would be, fantastically well-informed about other cultures or about the origins of life on earth. People do not remember much from television documentary beyond how good it was. 68. ( ) Documentaries are not what most people want to watch anyway. Television is at its most popular when it celebrates its own present. Its ideal subjects are those that need not be remembered and can be instantly replaced, where what matters most is what is happening now and what is going to happen next. Sport, news, panel games, cop shows, long-running soap operas, situation comedies — these occupy us only for as long as they are on. 69. ( ) The box is further neutralized by the sheer quantity people watch. The more of it you see, the less any single bit of it matters. Of course, some programs are infinitely better than others. There are gifted people working in television. But seen from a remoter perspective — say, four hours a night viewing for three months — the quality of individual programs means as much as the quality of each car in the rush-hour traffic. For the heavy viewer, TV has only two meaningful states — on and off. What are the kids doing Watching TV. No need to ask what, the answer is sufficient. Soon, I’’ll go up there and turn it off. Like a light bulb it will go out and the children will do something else. It appears that the nation’’s children spend more time in front of their TVs than in the classroom. Their heads are full of TV — but that’’s all, just TV. The Kojak violence they witness is TV violence, sufficient to itself. It does not brutalize them to the point where they cannot grieve the loss of a pet, or be shocked at some minor playground violence. Children, like everyone else, know the difference between TV and life. Lad knows its place. It imparts nothing but itself; it has its own rules, its own language, its own priorities. 70. ( ) Whatever the TV/video industry might now say, television will never have the impact on civilization that the invention of the written word has had. The book — this little hinged thing — is cheap, portable, virtually unbreakable, endlessly reusable, has instant replay facilities and in slow motion if you want it, needs no power lines, batteries or aerials, works in planes and train tunnels, can be stored indefinitely without much deterioration. A. Only those who knew something about the subject in the first place retain the information. B. Nor, I suspect, will they have become more sexist and trivial themselves from watching him. C. This is tough on those diligent professionals who produce excellent work; but since — as everyone agrees — awful programs far outnumber the good, it is a relief to know the former cannot do much harm. Television cannot even make impressionable children less pleasant. D. It is less amenable to censorship and centralized control, can be written and manufactured by relatively unprivileged individuals or groups, and — most sophisticated of all — dozens of different ones can be going at the same time, in the same room without a sound. E. It is because this little glowing, chattering screen barely resembles life at all that it remains so usefully ineffectual. To stare at a brick wall would waste time in a similar way. The difference is that the brick wall would let you know you were wasting your time. F. However good or bad it is, a night’’s viewing is wonderfully forgettable. It’’s a little sleep, it’’s entertainment; our morals, and for that matter, our brutality, remain intact.