Me and my big ideas! I have long been extolling the virtues (saying how good something is) of a TV-free home (not having a TV) and often suggested to my family the idea of removing the television from our house.
Click here for a vocabulary list of the words and phrases in bold.
I’m sure the benefits are obvious to most of you; more quality time spent with your family, more meaningful conversations, less distractions and increased ability to concentrate etc. It was with all this in mind that last week I again made the suggestion that we could try a week without television as an experiment. No Minimax corrupting my children’s brains with adverts for plastic crap they really don’t need, no Ordinace v Ružové Zahradě killing my wife’s brain cells with its mindnumbingly boring stories and personally less time wasted pretending I’m learning something by watching repeated episodes of TimeTeam on the History channel and bike races from Azerbaijan I have no real interest in on Eurosport.
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In English we use the word programme to mean a show ie. The Simpsons, Československo Má Talent. When you program in Czech we say channel eg. Nova Cinema, CT1, Prima Cool. Česká Televize is a TV station. In short:
- A TV Station broadcasts the shows and it may have more than one channel.
- A TV Channel is the frequency being used.
- A serial is a programme with one story split into many episodes.
- An episode is díl in Czech.
- A TV series has the same characters every week but different plots (stories).
- A season is a collection of episodes.
So, as an example; the BBC is a station, BBC1 is a channel, Lost is a serial and Lost has six seasons. The Big Bang Theory is a series and in season 9 there were 24 episodes. Got that? (Do you understand?)
Anyway, back to the case in point and two days ago Radka said to me “OK!, Yes, let’s do it.” So, we decided to remove the TV from the living room the following day (yesterday). It was then that I realised my mistake…
I love football, it’s one of my main interests; I play it, I go to stadiums and most importantly for this blog post, I watch it on TV. Those of you who are football fans will already see my error. Starting today is the European Championships in France. Usually, for these big tournaments (the Euros and World Cup) I watch every game, not just the England and Czech Republic games. So what am I to do now? Our gogglebox is hidden away at my request and with it the chance to watch the best footballers in Europe fight it out for the title of Champions of Europe. I can’t believe I didn’t think this through properly.
Does anyone want to invite me to their house to watch a game?
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