Too Much TV

I really must stop watching so much TV.

For a start, it's a real time-Hoover: I sit down to look at "just one" programme. Three hours later, I'm yawning and looking at the clock and, good grief, where did the night go?

That's not the only reason I should stop watching so much TV, though. I should stop watching because, over and over again, it drives home the point that I'm just a completely inferior person.

Have you noticed that:

• In shows that contain "scientist" characters, that character knows how to do everything even remotely scientific from conducting an autopsy to building a nuclear bomb. Where did they find the time to learn all these different disciplines? I've spent more than 20 years in IT and still only have a couple of closely-related specialist skill areas. A subspecies of this character-type is the Computer Geek who can access any computer system anywhere, regardless of what security the system has and can also do miracles of image-enhancement, face recognition etc. Yeah, right! And uploading a virus onto an alien spaceship a la Independence Day, don't get me started on that one!

• Everybody knows martial arts. This certainly seems to apply to all criminal characters (except maybe the 90-odd year-old Mafia Don, but even he can surprise you). It definitely applies to shows with supernatural or superhero characters. It used to annoy me in, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when a character became a vampire, they suddenly acquired all these fighting skills, regardless of what their physical condition had been before the change. No years sweating it out at the local Karate club for them!

• Everybody seems to be a superhero, a secret agent, a demon/angel or a combination of all three (hmm, maybe there's room in the schedules for a demon who works as an agent of the FBI by day and solves crimes in a daft costume by night... ach, maybe not). Assuming they're not a scientist, that is.

My school just did not equip me for this kind of world. Where were the classes in hacking and Bomb disposal? An O-Level in Geography just isn't going to cut it when the zombies come.

To be fair we did have a fairly vigourous Arson programme (several bits of the school have been burnt to the ground over the years).

I have two choices here: enrol in whatever Academy teaches the accelerated learning programme to make me a multi-disciplinary scientist/Geek (at the same time whipping by body into shape with some intensive martial arts training)

or

Just stop watching so much TV.