An American Worker in London
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Television
The hotel offers 6 or 7 channels, and that's only when channel 7 is operational. Mostly, I get BBC news morning and night, several sitcoms during the evening, and some variety shows on the other channels. On occasion, channel 7 provides a movie, and tonight it's Drop Zone with Wesley Snipes, I think.
For shows like this, it seems they provide programming for 25 minutes at a time, and then turn to about 5 minutes of commercials. That's kind of nice. They don't run commercials more frequently, and I like it that way.
However, when the commercials come on, they blast me out of the room with their higher volume. Maybe they could sell TVs here like we have in the States that sense the higher volume and automatically turn it down or you. In the hotel, I grab the remote and hit the "Mute" button right away.
From my limited experience with available channels and the time for watching in the evenings, it seems that the British have a great deal of interest in magic and hypnotism shows. I have seen at least one TV show weekly on these subjects since I've been here. "The 10 Greatest Magic Tricks." "The 10 Most Dangerous Magic Tricks." "The 10 Magic Tricks Even the Magicians Can't Figure Out." It goes on and on.
The TV is called the "Telly" over here. You might hear someone at the office asking a co-worker, "what's on the telly tonight?" It's never called a TV. That's an American concept.
A commercial -- sorry, an "advert" -- just came on announcing the "10 Scariest Movies of All Time". It never ends here.
