When I was working in radio back in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, I ran into an old-time announcer who would tell the occasional person who would call in and bitch about something, "If you look at your radio set, you will note that it has at least two controls. One changes the station and the other turns it off. If you don't like what you hear, I suggest that you use either one or the other."

Same holds for television sets.

My wife and I do watch a fair amount of television. Rarely commercial channels. We have two local PBS affiliates on which we can watch such programs as Masterpiece Classics, which recently aired several British film versions of Jane Austen's novels (Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Emma, a couple of others), a few years ago, an excellent multi-episode dramatization of Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre, with Zelah Clarke as a very convincing Jane and Timothy Dalton as the brooding Mr. Rochester, Masterpiece Mystery (tonight's is a production of Agatha Christie's classic mystery, Murder on the Orient Express starring David Suchet as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Other well-crafted mysteries are Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett and Inspector Morse with John Thaw. Excellent comedies such as As Time Goes By (Judi Dench, Geoffrey Palmer), comedy-dramas such as Doc Martin (idiosyncratic doctor—barfs at the sight of blood—with a lousy bedside manner, and his love-hate relationship with his various patients in a small town in Cornwall), and gritty police drama about four older police detectives assigned to solve old, unsolved or re-opened cases, called New Tricks. All well written and well acted.

In non-fiction, PBS affiliates offer such things as Frontline (current events in depth), Nova (science and nature), Independent Lens (independent films and documentaries), and a lot more. Not to mention the excellent Ken Burns documentaries. In music, Command Performance, Live from the Met, Live from Lincoln Center. . . .   Recently an unusual dramatization (modern dress version) of Hamlet, with Patrick Stewart (Capt. Jean-Luc Picard) as both Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father.

There is also the Discovery Channel and the History Channel.

It's very fashionable to poop on television. But most evenings, if you can't find something worth watching on the boob tube, you just ain't lookin'. Some evenings, you even have to make a choice. And of course you can always choose not to watch at all. Nobody's holding a gun to you head.

Are they? If so, you have an entirely different problem.

Don Firth