National Absurder: A Brief History of TV

“Good evening. I am Stephen Hawking. Tonight I will explain my Theory of Relative TV. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was a visionary. He once commissioned a study to see if it was possible to transmit pictures and sound through the air to be seen at another location through a viewing box. He concluded that the technologies were not yet available to accomplish such a feat. However, the task had been set in motion, and some decades later television was invented. First it was Black and White TV, and then color TV. Today we have cathode ray TV, LCD TV, plasma TV, and projection TV. Ralph Kramden finally has his 3-D TV. But so much of today’s 3-D is artificial, similar to early colorization. It’s a neat trick, but imperfect. Sound quality has not advanced as rapidly as picture quality. Speakers are still small. Digitized sound, like MP3 compression, sucks the big one. But none of this really matters. Notice the immense popularity of such low quality video such as Skype, phone cameras, and amateur on line videos. High end TV is a sham, important only for social status, bragging rights, and corporate profit. TV quality has in fact exceeded its practical purposes. Unless the picture and sound are distractingly bad, they are quickly ignored, no longer noticed after the first few moments of appreciation. Ultimately, the only quality that counts is in content. Well produced content looks good on any TV. I leave you now with a fine example of quality TV production.”