Can we stop it please with the silly TV references on this forum? It's getting really out of hand and it bloody annoying.
This reminds me of the episode of Family Guy where Peter crashes his car into the cable tv satellite uplink and killed tv for the entire town. Hilarious hijinks ensued, of course, part of which was how he put the blame for killing tv on his daughter's head, rather than his own, but the main point is how Peter suffered serious television withdrawals and came up with the novel device of creating his own television by suspending a frame in front of him which he could view reality through.
This frame somehow softened the blow that reality normally has and tamed it. Peter was unable to handle full reality, but he could easily handle the 'filtered' reality through his newly devised framing device. (Note. The filtering was obviously post perception, in this instance, as it was reality which he was viewing although he had convinced himself that it was television.)
Such a perceptual trick could cause one to put oneself in all sorts of dangerous situations as there is the buffer zone of 'it's only television' that makes on think one is safe. Walking in traffic, for instance. Or wandering through a dangerous part of town to watch a documentary on the seedy underbelly of our youth culture in the inner city...
An interesting phenomena, if you think about it.
At the end of the episode, Peter comes to realize his dependence upon television and gives a last word of advice to the audience at home, (thus breaking the infamous
fourth wall) "Turn off your televisions. Now."
At which point the episode abruptly ended in a hiss of static.
(Note: It's been a long time since I've actually watched television, and I am now thinking that I might be hazy on several of the details. Perhaps even going so far as to merge several episodes in my mind. I'm sure some of our 'you tube' watchers could find the episode in question so that Spurious could refuse to follow the link.)
