Quizzy Thursday

Ok, I am sorry, got problems with my computer last night, couldn't post anything, but this is what I wrote. I did it last night, by hand, and I'm gonna tell you, I liked it better than typing.

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Sometimes I remember that, not a long time ago, we only have two TV networks (if you can call them that): the first channel and the second channel. The latter got the signal from UHF waves and we call it, precisely, the UHF (u-hache-efe).

The 2-channel TV did something for Spanish society that no network can do today anymore: kept people connected to a common ground of social life and style, a positive get-all-together force. Somehow, at 10 pm the whole country was watching the same. On the contrary, the TV of today has a segregating effect, and ties between people are to be found in different realms (soccer, realities, facebook). Today TV is a format that enhance the size of the unknown and wild outer world, makes it look bigger that it really is. Lots of channels, lots of distractions, lots of offers, and you can get your personal spot: what you watch one night might have not been watched by none in your surroundings.

I remember one Friday night, I was about 11 or 12. The movie Monster, with Cher in it and that face-disfigured boy, was being released on TV, first channel. My parents were not home, went out with some friends for a drink, but they were about to come back. It was 9 or 9.30 pm. My father was at the time the Head of an Institute for Professional Education, working with youngsters from 14 to 20 years old, most of them drop-outs from High-Schools, casualties in the road to College and Universities. Somebody phoned, somebody from the Institute, probably the Ethics teacher or the Philosophy teacher: "is your father home?"; "No"; "Are you watching now this movie, Monster? You should. What do you think? I just would like to share the opinion with you"... I was terrified. Such an awkward question... Pretty much like when this 13-year-old girl asked me through the phone if I wanted to sleep with her... We had 4 phones in the house.

These memories spurred today after dinner. It is Thursday and it is the quizz night in London. Lots of pubs throw their quizzes. People get together in groups and drink beer and answer questions. "In what year was introduced the 1-pound coin in Britain?"; "In what US city was killed Martin Luther King?". It kind of surprise me: the ferocious people of the ferocious London, sitting in a pub, quite and silent, as to hear a pin drop, writing answers like those in a piece of paper. I mean, looks like the type of things nuns do for fun.

But the quizz thing operates like the two-channel TV. Everybody around the same thing. After all, the unassailable, wild, sleepless towns of the modern man is an urban myth. It is all the same, now and 100 years ago in the country side, in East Anglia or Essex, or Sussex or wherevex, the same people needing their little pleasures and securities, their cozy and warm fire in the shed; perhaps, today we are just too more exposed to evil.

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