Television Tyranny   Review by Mike Gange

by John Pungente & Martin O’Malley

McClelland & Stewart Inc, $29.99, 254 pages

You may like TV. You may even love TV. But do you know TV?

Canadian kids watch television, on average, for 17.9 hours a week. By graduation, they will have spent 11,000 hours in a classroom but 15,000 hours watching television, including some 350,000 commercials. On Sept 2, 1997, Time Magazine reported that in the U.S. 342,686 people attended the 12 major league baseball games played that day; 1,28 million went to the movies; 10.96 million households watched Home Improvement on TV.

More than Meets The Eye: Watching Television Watching Us is more about admiring and understanding the medium than it is about bashing TV. John Pungente, a Canadian Jesuit priest, has devoted himself to the study of the media in general and television in particular, since the 1960's. He has helped publish the Ontario Ministry of Education’s curriculum guide to teaching about television, served on many media literacy organizations in Canada and abroad, and is a respected international authority who speaks and writes about the need for media awareness. O’Malley is a writer, journalist and screenwriter, and his credits include seven books, along with articles published in major magazines and newspaper.

This book is not just facts and figures about television. It tells stories about television that appeal to everyone: families and singles, young and old. And teenagers, whose market importance is studied, catered to, and delivered to advertisers. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about teenagers," write Pungente and O’Malley. "Buffy comes closer to depicting the reality of teenage life than anything else on television. Don’t be fooled by the weekly dose of vampires and monsters. The vampires and monsters are the point, metaphors for really raging hormones. Buffy could be a role model for all teenage girls. She is smart, willing to learn about herself and live with who she is, even if she happens to be a vampire slayer," they write.

Why are so few Canadian shows major hits, both here and in the US? The writers explain, "ER costs about $20 million an episode to make, costs CTV about $75,000 an episode to buy, brings in revenues of $200,000 per episode, and attracts 13 per cent of the 18 to 49 year olds....Traders. Canada’s home grown show, costs $1.2 million to make, costs Global $200,000 to buy, brings in revenues of $125,000 per episode and attracts 3 percent of 18 to 49 years olds. ER is cheaper to buy and attracts a much larger audience."

There are lots of fun, little tidbits in this book. "Guests on the Jerry Springer Show sign forms stipulating that they are what they say they are, that if they are perpetrating a hoax, they are liable for damages and the production costs of the show," they write. The hoax the producers worried about happened when four Canadian guests appeared, purporting to be a husband and wife, their baby sitter and her boy friend. After some prompting from Springer, the "husband" confessed to the "wife" that he had been having a sexual liaison with the baby sitter. Turned out, all four guests were from a comedy troupe in Toronto and it was a put-on from start to finish. The four now face an $80, 000 lawsuit.

There is also an examination of issues like the controversial YNN (Youth Network News) proposal which offers television sets for every classroom, a satellite dish, basic television production facilities and computers for all classrooms. In return the schools had to agree to show the 12 minute news and information program with commercials, to all students in the school every school day for five years.

The authors observe "We have no knowledge of the beliefs, values, politics and commercial interests of the people at YNN. The issue is not free equipment, it is an issue of choice. Should our classrooms be for sale?" Pungente and O’Malley throw in this clincher: the TV sets could not be turned off, and the volumes could not be adjusted.

Pungente and O’Malley have given us reasons to get to know television a little better.

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.