The attention felt almost flattering. The marketeer in the cancellation department, the last line of defence at my cable TV supplier, tried everything to make me stay. He sympathised with my aversion to the hamburger adverts that popped up, saying he, too, liked to stay healthy (not that the saturated fat content bugged me - it was more the shots of guzzling dorks).
The marketeer then effectively resorted to bribery, offering to slash my monthly subscription by the price of a DVD. Above all, he kept trying to keep me talking but it was mission impossible. Finally, I just said: 'Look, I have to go,' and he wearily went through the closure procedure and I agreed to hand the silver 'digibox' atop my TV back to a courier at a specified date.
After that phone call I toyed with recanting for the sake of easy access to soccer, war documentaries and various warped cartoons. When I handed the digibox over, it hurt. I went through with the sacrifice not because I'm happy with terrestrial TV - I can't stand it. I'm shunning TV altogether because I can find all the content I need online - and it's not bad either.
Just look at podcasts (radio show downloads). I love being able to: a) choose my DJ, egghead, comedian or whatever, and b) play the show in question when I feel like it - usually the drunken small hours of the weekend. The idea of controllers scheduling programmes at times they deem appropriate seems increasingly last century. Decommissioning the TV does away with that.
Now it squats in the corner eclipsed by my LCD screen desktop computer, looking a relic at best, a dinosaur at worst. The passive monstrosity looks even more irrelevant because I can now pick up oodles of fascinating animated content for free - and legally to boot - using Google Video, which offers everything from the world's clumsiest pole dancer to 9/11 conspiracy theories. To broaden the scope, I explore video variety show sites such as YouTube, Grouper, AddictingClips.com and Screenhead, which pitches itself as a free shopping mall of 'gross Photoshop humour, idiotic Flash animations, laughable Japanese commercials updated 12 times a day'.
Admittedly, wherever you look, you won't exactly find much opera. One reviewer summed up the content as 'half-dressed teenagers gyrating in their bedrooms, or spectacular car and plane wrecks'. You could argue that this take is charitable. Just look at the YouTube gem titled 'Daisy shows up and starts talking crap'. But at least you don't have to face commercial breaks.
