OneAndOneIs2

I hate American television.

Anyone in England who resents paying the BBC for a TV license badly needs to spend a couple weeks forced to watch nothing but American TV to discover just how bad TV gets when it's all commercial, with no advert-free competition.

It's not just the fact that you get adverts right after the opening credits. Or adverts at the bottom of the screen during the program. Or the fact that Americans seem to think that having hundreds of channels is a good thing.

It isn't, and here's why:

Follow up:

There hasn't been enough good TV made to allow for hundreds of channels showing nothing but good TV

This means, inescapably, that if you have hundreds of full-time channels, they have no choice but to pad the good stuff with utter, utter crap.

And since everyone is showing crap, and because crap is cheaper than quality, there's no particular pressure on you to not show crap. And so you wind up with the metaphorical situation of having a few nuggets of gold dispersed haphazardly throughout a giant heap of manure.

But that's not the point I want to make.

The point I want to make is about the adverts.

Specifically, the advert for medications.

We don't get these in the UK, not to anywhere near the level that they do over here. I assume it's because we get whatever pills the NHS decides to give us, whereas America is privatised so they have whatever pills they can be convinced to buy? I don't know, just a guess.

Whatever the reason, every time the TV is on, I see adverts for pills. Painkillers, antidepressants, viagra & its ilk, slimming pills, muscle-building pills, nutritional supplement pills...

I doubt many of the people who read this blog will have heard of Foamy the Squirrel, Neurotically Yours, or iLL Will PreSS. It's a cartoon, and it took me a while to get into it myself. I've since watched every cartoon. Several times.

And probably my favourite character is the squirrel named Pillz-e. You can probably guess from his name & the context what his defining characteristic is.

The thing is, every time I watch American TV, I hear this song in my head. And it cracks me up. So I thought I'd share it with anyone else who might benefit from it :o)