h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Have you ever noticed that people on TV never seem to watch TV (except in the Royale Family of course).

Apart from News and documentaries has anyone ever noticed instances of this phenomenon?

PP

Two reasons. Television screens can not be shown easily on TV, for technical reasons. You rarely see the TV screen even on the Royle family.

Also, watching someone watching TV is like watching paint dry. There are better things to do.

Yeah, the whole stroboscope effect will ruin it. And you also have to pay the people who has copyright to that two seconds of Lassie you show in the series.

I think 'they' may have orvercome this problem now. When watching news items about share dealers or anywhere with screens the screens always flickered annoyingly in the background, but now this doesnt happen.

"watching someone watching TV is like watching paint dry"

When I mused upon this initially I had not taken into account the phenomenal success of Big Brother.

Big Brother is literally sitting in a house watching other people sitting in a house.

News programmes often have a large monitor on the set. This seems to work well enough. I guess this is because of 100hz refresh rates etc. In fact is you could set a screen to refresh at a rate that was not replicated at home the problem could be made to dissapear. This is all tied up in some way with the phenomenon witnessed during motor racing when car wheels can be observed from time to time appearing to go backwards. In fact we know that the only wheels to actually go backwards are those on the car of any British driver

PP

You just need to set the frequenzy of the screen so it is in sync with the camera`s frequency. Although I think in many instances it is just a blue screen and the tv image is put digitally on.

I think professional camcorders (Betacam, etc.) have had TV/monitor specific sync functions for quite a few years, so there isn't a real technical reason, but I'd agree with the idea that most of the time it'd be rather dull.
There *is* the cliched 'turn on the TV and see the vital news broadcast' device, usually in thrillers, but since the necessary information is usually verbal, and the viewer's reaction is important, it's often shot from behind the TV.

You sometimes see the back of a TV set or hear the theme tune of a programme, to let you know that they're watching.

There always seemed a considerable lack of television media in science fiction shows. Star Trek didn't seem to have any TV at all until one of the films showed Kirk being filmed by a cameraman. Doctor Who cheekily had a television in Remembrance of the Daleks which was set in 1963 a day or so after the original Doctor left the earth! The television announcer was just announcing a new science fiction show called "Doctor W..." when the set was switched off. They watch videos in Red Dwarf. And they often watched TV in Men Behaving Badly.