When I first came to this world, after I settled in, I ended up in someone’s house and they said to me “Do you want to watch TV?”. I didn’t have a clue what they meant.
So they turned on the Screen in the corner.
“Turn that thing off” I said to them, “I’ve had enough Screen Propaganda to last me a lifetime. But they didn’t turn it off. And there was no Propaganda. There was Wheel of Fortune.
You see, back in my timeline, TV didn’t exist. Screens were used exclusively to display messaging from Them. To drip feed us propaganda all day designed to strip away our freedoms.
That’s why the Screen fucked me up when I saw it. But then my jaw hit the ground. They pressed a button and the Screen changed.
“What?” he said. “I have Cable.”
Well let me tell you something about Cable Television, boys and girls. It’s a masterpiece. Dozens of channels and every single one showing something different.
He turned on one and it was some bullshit GodProp. He told me it was Christianity but it felt just like the cult that They started where I came from. He tried to rewind it to show me that it was different but I didn’t want any of that.
The next channel was showing a pair of films back to back – don’t you call that a double feature? The guy told me it was some sort of ‘Indiana Jones ripoff’, some throwaway archaeologist running away from murderers instead of boulders. Although entertaining it grew old quickly.
We took a break from the Cable as he dug out an old VHS his relative from the UK had sent him. Doctor Who he said it was called. Some interdimensional time alien that just appeared and disappeared as it liked and left a path of destruction behind it despite claiming it was doing everything to save the world. I found it to be about as sincere as a sneeze so we turned that off.
Finally we put the Cable back on. He said he had to show me this one channel which was showing the most viewed show in the World, Champion of all the ratings. But when I saw it was some two-bit Pirate show with the main character running around calling everyone ‘hearty’ and searching for rum, even I knew that was a tired cliché.
That’s when I realised that it didn’t matter how much of a masterpiece this Cable TV was, it was all a waste of fuckin’ time. We all have two eyes and we can only watch one channel at a time, no matter how many they offer us. And all of these shows my new friend had shown me were boring as shit.
There’s a new channel in town called Vigour, and it only shows good times. 24/7. And come Wrestle Heroes, when the folks at home turn on their Screens, there’s only one channel they’re gonna tune into, and believe me they’ll never want to take their eyes off this…
So let’s do it now, and do it loud!