A three — to four — to five-hour experience with nothingness.
Already we Viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.'' I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.
If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.
Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
People assume you can't be shy and be on television. They're wrong.
Performing doesn't turn me on. It's an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas — including this one.
So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.
Television — a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.