It dawned on me yesterday whilst I watched day time TV (I was sick..okay!) that the attraction with these melodramatic episodes, labelled entertainment by some, is one of absolutism. Everything is mapped out in nice little packages. Everything has a meaning…A root cause…All so neat and tidy..spotless! The episode of Blue Heelers I was observing in the background while I nursed my microbe infested body had some teenager on a Rampage with an M16. Of course his father is a Vietnam Vet and as it turns out, his comrade in arms, who by coincidence is a neighbour in Mt Thomas, had a hidden stash of firearms that this kid happens to dig up with a metal detector. Anyway I need not go into superfluous detail of what amounts to nothing, however it just struck me that the story was very tidy.

Unlike my life or perhaps yours; things are never so precise. One plus One doesn’t necessarily add up to two in real life drama. It is my experience that there is often unseen variables that play a part in the melodrama. It could be that things do just add up. Perhaps the reason this fictional kid lost the plot was because his Father was a violent Vietnam Vet and didn’t pay attention to him. I’ve sort of lost my logic…Because it is starting to make sense. The character plot…not my dissemblingly of thoughts.

What I am trying to convey is that I have come to understand why we like to sit in front of our favourite TV show and be lost in the drama unfolding. It gives us a taste of the absolute, which for the most part, our own lives is lacking. We are on an absurd daily routine that doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into a cause and affect scenario, although if we begin to psychoanalyse we are sure to attach little pieces of causation into the messiness. TV adapts this need into a neat package that we can devour in an hour time slot between the messy odds and ends that we call a day.