TV’s going to kill me? I’d better hurry and finish this box-set...

IWAS fishing around under sofa cushions for the doofer as the credits rolled on one of our ‘must-watches’ the other night, when a question came from my co-viewer. ‘Do you ever imagine going a week without the internet?’

‘All the time,’ I replied and, into the bargain, threw in a 20-second mutter about those hopeless social media addicts who spend entire evenings glued to the stuff – honestly, like they have nothing else in their lives.

‘Obviously there would be no TV either,’ she said. I stifled a whimper of panic.

We were by now four-month veterans of lockdown and that unfeasibly large screen on the living room wall had been our companion almost every night.

We had devoured season five of Better Call Saul, made short work of Ozark and binged on every episode of the beguiling Monterey-based Big Little Lies, starring Reese Witherspoon.

That led us to Little Fires Everywhere – in which Witherspoon also appears – and currently we are oscillating between Get Shorty and True Detective.

The latter is superlative storytelling – TV which reaches beyond anything I remember from the supposed golden age of the medium in the 1970s and 1980s.

With huge budgets from subscription TV networks such as HBO and the distinction between small and silver screens on the brink of collapse, writers and producers are stretching their legs, pushing their art form towards literature.

Devoured

Yes, for sheer emotional punch, for suspense, for its probing, unflattering lens, TV at its best need nurse no inferiority complex in sharing a room with the Penguin classics on your bookshelf. And, from my somewhat sunken berth on the sofa, I say more power to it.

It is disappointing to note, then, that scientific research says something different. This week brings news that the number one leisure pursuit of lockdown is a killer.

Watch more than two hours a day, says the study from the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Health and Wellbeing, and your risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke increases exponentially.

Dr Hamish Foster, who led the research, speaks grimly of ‘bad health outcomes’ for people like me and my co-viewer who, after the briefest of consultations, cruise straight into our third hour-long episode of Get Shorty of the night because, well, we couldn’t leave it on a cliff-hanger.

Worse, says the research, couch potatoes exacerbate the harm they are doing to themselves by grazing while they view.

‘More popcorn, dear? Or shall I open another packet of those jelly beans we like?’

There are, for me, a number of ironies to all this. The first is that binge-watching TV is a vice primarily of my own generation.

For once it is impossible to look back to my parents’ day and claim they were still more flagrant offenders – or to invoke my daughter’s Generation Z contemporaries as proof of my moderation.

No, they are the moderates, the ‘social’ viewers who can take it or leave it. I am the glutton. I recall my daughter telling me when she moved into a student flat in Edinburgh that there was no TV in the place. Oh, the deprivation! I almost wept for the girl.

‘Never you mind,’ I told her. ‘You can have my old 32incher. I’ve upgraded.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. don’t miss it.’ Weirdo.

Another irony is the extent to which this viewing matter is dominated by American talent. I am a Scot, interested above all in my own country as it navigates this latter-day identity crisis, and yet I see little of it represented in television drama. Indeed, for the truly satisfying Scottish ‘I drama serial I must spool back more than three decades to Tutti Frutti, John Byrne’s satire on Scottish rock culture.

It was instructive – and depressing – to note that, on the launch of the BBC Scotland channel last year, this was the repeat that garnered audiences. And, though they were not huge, they were far beyond the embarrassing figures which The Nine, the channel’s flagship news broadcast, was seeing.

Ironic

Why is it, I wonder between mouthfuls of popcorn and episodes on Netflix of Unorthodox – the story of a New York Hasidic Jew who flees her arranged marriage for a new life in Berlin – that Scotland’s cupboards are so bare in this most moreish of cultural mediums? I find it ironic, too, that some of the greatest jewels from television’s yesterdays are unavailable to watch while platforms such as Netflix and Amazon hoover up endless hours of rubbish.

Where, for example, can I revisit A Very Peculiar Practice, one of the most memorable comic dramas of the 1980s?

What better moment than now to rewatch the 1977 miniseries Roots, whose depiction of the American slave trade has been emblazoned on my consciousness since I first saw it as a nine-year-old?

On our ever-burgeoning complement of channels and media service providers I have searched in vain for both for years. But in answer to my co-viewer’s question, yes, I reckon if my life really did depend on it I could manage a week away from the box.

The thing is, I am not convinced of any great risk at all.

Rather, it seems to me that, for every avenue of human pleasure, there is a corresponding group of boffins working day and night to prove that it will kill us.

All this negativity cannot be good for them.