YOU’RE watching your favorite show on television. The sound is just right. They break for commercial THEN SUDDENLY THE TV IS BLARING AT YOU!!

That’s the most annoying part of watching television. I’ve read the claim that they don’t actually turn the sound up when the commercials come on, but that strikes me as a big old lie. The station may not turn up the sound, but the commercials are recorded to be a higher volume than the shows we are watching. That sounds suspiciously like the claims made on television commercials which say “Acme products have unparalleled quality!” Notice, they don’t say it is better than other products, simply not exactly the same. It’s true, but it’s a clever misdirection, intended to deceive.

You’re watching a weekly television show. You don’t always watch, but catch it now and then. It’s a good episode, but as it fails to close the plot when the hour ends, you suddenly realize you are about to enter the “to be continued” zone. Nooooooooooo! What if I’m busy next week at this time? What if I forget when this show is on next week? Ambushed again.

OR HOW ABOUT how they use critical information to tease you to watch their news? “Has the swine flu hit your child’s school, yet? Find out with your Channel 12 News Team at 10 p.m. tonight!” It would be too easy to make a real announcement and say “still no swine flu cases in our area.” That wouldn’t get anxious viewers tuning in for the 30 seconds of news in the 10 p.m. hour saying “just kidding, there aren’t any cases in this area!”

No, they won’t break in to tell you the real news about a real crisis. That’s for teasing. But let a thunder cloud get within 30 miles of the television station, and the weather guy will be preempting the first five minutes of Law & Order — the ones where you find out what the plot is going to be — to warn you that thunder clouds mean rain, and sometimes lightning or water run off. Do the station bosses go home at 6 p.m. and leave the weather man in charge of the station? That’s sure what it seems. Why else would they let the weather man hijack a show to tell us one more time that sometimes it rains hard in this area, and that means thunder, lightning and flooding?! We get it! It’s raining again. Run the weather warning banner at the bottom of the screen if you must TV stations, but don’t have the weather man interrupt unless it’s really, really an emergency.

SPEAKING OF local news, remember when the news was mainly news? Remember when they had reporters, instead of an eye witness news team? Eye witness. Really? Isn’t the guy they’re interviewing supposed to be the eye witness? Remember when every newscast didn’t include mindless chatting among the “eye witness news team” members about everything from their kids, to their dogs, to their extra curricular activities? As Dragnet’s Sergeant Joe Friday used to say “just the facts, ma’am.”

I make these rants as vox populi — as the voice of the people. I am merely speaking for you, giving voice to your own peeves. We all have them, but I get the pleasure of writing publicly about them.

No rant about TV would be complete without the unscheduled change in the TV schedule. According to the TV Guide, a certain show is on at a certain time. You make note of it, and plan on watching, but as you turn it on, you find that “your regularly scheduled program will not be seen tonight, so that we may bring you the Olympic Curling Semi Finals from Oslo, Norway.”

Now, where did I put that lying TV Guide?

© 2009, Pappy Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Pappy Moore is a humorist, a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home.

oaktreefm58@hotmail.com

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