TV Crimes
‘IF statistics really are worse than damn lies, the Office for National Statistics must be home to every con man, pergurer and charlatan in town.
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| ‘If TV adds on 10lbs, how many cameras are on Vanessa Feltz?’ |
But they do produce a lot of work, and not a week passes without us learning how many blonde women on Merseyside shave their legs on a Tuesday and what a 15-year-old boy in Cheam can buy for £4.27.
Todays news from the sink of falsehood has been noticed by the Guardian and stupidly passed on as some kind of fact to its readers.
The story is that the average British couple spend just two hours on a weekday in each others company.
While this in enough for some, and too much for others, the allotted time for family affairs lowers to just 78 minutes when there are children in the household.
Reading on, we learn that those two hours are, in actual fact, a more precise 126 minutes.
And of those, 51 minutes are passed not in conversation or even in a row but in watching the likes of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen paint some colour-blind homeowners attic room.
TV rules the roost, and thats bad since the Telegraph has leant that TV can make you fat.
We dont means that a TV camera adds 10lbs to a presenters frame, but that you can get fat just by watching the magic box.
The hold-the-presses news is that children aged between five and 15 who spend more than two hours a day watching TV (i.e. all of them) tend to be fatter than those who do not.
Yes, its true, sitting still and vegetating in front of the magic box will not make you slim regardless of how many times you burn calories by flicking the buttons on your remote control and blinking.
A Dr Robert Hancox, who published his cutting-edge research in the Lancet, discovered this amazing truth after studying the lifestyles of 1,000 children born in 1972 and 1973.
The expert recommends that children watch no more than one to two hours of TV a day, and that less than one hour would be even better – and, we suppose (although not being Doctors, we can only guess) that watching no TV might be the ideal.
However, the biggest surprise is that the study found no link between TV viewing and blood pressure.
Odd news to anyone who has turned purple with a hint of red and maroon after seeing what the aforesaid Bowen has done to some poor sods house with our TV licence money…’
Posted: 16th, July 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
