ZappingPeople watching TV are viewers. Viewers who watch a lot of television without caring what they watch are couch potatoes. If you zap between channels, you use your remote control or zapper to change channels a lot, perhaps looking for something interesting to watch, and perhaps not succeeding. A zapper is also a person who zaps. Informal words for television are the tube in the US, and the box or the telly in Britain. Sorting out the channels. Two articles about zapping, one from the Times and one from Today, have been mixed up. There are six sections in the first article and five in the second. 1. Say which headlines and sections make up each article. (a. is the first section of the first article and b. is the first section of the second.) 2. Find all the expressions in both articles that mean “change channels”. Going for the Big Break / Shouting at the Box a. Pity the poor television advertiser. He fights for our attention, but it is an unequal fight. We turn on our TV sets to watch programmes; he would rather we watched his adverts. And these days the advertiser has something else to contend with: the zapper, the remote control. The moment a programme is finished or even half-way finished the selfish viewer turns the telly off, or over. b. Remember the time when there was no such thing as a remote control for the telly and you had to haul yourself out of the armchair to change channels? Now everything is about to change again with a new voice-activated method. c. The idea is that instead of pressing buttons, we will be able to channel-hop simply by shouting commands at the set, which will react using “voice recognition”. “Channel One, you ‘orrible little telly”, gets you BBC1, and so on. d. This is the problem tackled by the Zapper and the Advertiser, a new study from the Billett Consultancy. The consultancy looked at 1,000 households. You could have worked out most of the findings yourself, but there are a couple of surprises. e. The first is that quality is appreciated. Billet found that more people are likely to get bored with a one-hour LA Law than a one-hour Maigret. Eight per cent of live football watchers flip over during half-time, never to return. People change over half as often during weekends. f. Perhaps now is the time to remove programme credits, Billett say, their logic being that most people switch off when the credits come on, anyway. g. This is a bit like a biscuit manufacturer announcing that it will no longer make the first and last biscuits in a pack because they always get broken. Billett believes that ITV could increase the number of viewers aged 16 to 24 if it stopped end-credits and end-break advertising. h. Can you imagine the chaos throughout the living rooms of Britain if this thing catches on? i. “We also wonder whether a sensible change would be to increase the advertising minutage for centre-breaks during peak hours and a reduction in end-break minutage.” So, this could be the future: a brief pause for breath between programmes, but a massive slice of advertising during them. The advertisers will get you yet. j. At least with the zapper there is only one person in charge of the set at a time. As far as I can make out, using this technique, …whoever shouts the quickest wins. There’ll be my husband bellowing “three, three, three,” for the news the kids screaming “six, six, six” for Sky, and me shouting at it to switch itself off. k. At which point the set will probably have a breakdown. Life was so much simpler when the set stayed on the same channel for three days because no one could be bothered to get up and change it.
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