Below is a rant about invasive and omnipresent TV screens, by Mark Kitto. It was originally published in the Shanghai British Chamber of Commerce magazine.

If you want to know who is responsible for the author's discomfort, look no further than these guys:

Focus Media: TVs everywhere (Chinese only)
Target Media: TVs in office and apartment buildings (Chinese only)
Capad TV: TVs in Shanghai taxis (English and Chinese)

Here's the rant:

TV

When I moved into the first place that I could call my very own home, a one bedroom flat in West Kensington, I made a life-changing choice. I did not buy a television. I never really liked television, because, like many people who confess to hating it, I could never turn the thing off. And thanks to the remote control, I would never watch a programme from start to finish. Rather like my bedside reading I would always have at least three stories on the go at once. It drove me crazy. To be honest, I drove myself crazy. So when I started my own life, I started it without television.

It was fantastic. Visitors had to talk to me – and listen to me – I learnt to play the piano again, and I read lots of books. If I needed technicolour moving pictures I had the washing machine. Quality of life improved immeasurably.

Thus I enjoyed a cathode free existence, until I came to Cathay.

Still I did not watch television as such, but I did have one, as in a machine, for videos and then VCDs and now DVDs. But that was different. I had to make a conscious decision to watch a movie, there was no chance to channel surf and even if I had been interested to try, I had no aerial so all I got was snowflakes. Quality viewing was the order of the evening, with the odd American remake of Ealing comedy thrown in. (Have you seen the latest one of The Ladykillers? What a sacrilege if ever there was one!)

However, having successfully escaped the mind numbing and confining box that TV puts your life in, just recently it has been invading mine again. Only this is worse than having one in front of your sofa. The things are appearing everywhere. They are in the tube stations, in the tube trains themselves, in the headrests of taxis, in lifts, in lift lobbies, arrayed up above the spirit shelves in bars (all on different channels), hanging in the corner above dance floors – tuned to MTV whilst the DJ plays Channel V. They are literally taking over our every waking minute of our tiring lives in Shanghai. I even saw one on the side of that building with Aurora on the top that faces you from Pudong as you sweep down onto the Bund from the gao jia. A ten-story high TV screen, with a Pepsi advertisement in full primary colour motion. As if that bend was not already dangerous enough with tourists slowing to a dead stop to take photos of the Bund as they come down onto it. Now they linger to watch TV for a few minutes longer. It was horrific, all too literally.

It is hard to say which of these new screen ‘venues’ is more bugging. The tubes on the tube trains are set just above a tall – for which read commonly a foreign – person’s head height as you sit down. Just as the staring stopped in sophisticated Shanghai, so it has started again, to a spot a few centimeters above your head, which is almost worse. Am I going bald? Am I still wearing my nightcap? Is it really that long since I washed my hair? Similar in the bars. A friend almost started a fight with someone who did not stop staring at him recently. He was being driven to distraction until he realized the opposite number was watching the Red Sox through his own fringe. Watch any chatting couple in a bar, same sex or not, and at least one will be talking to a spot somewhere above the head of his partner.

My personal favourite for this vent are the screens in the headrests of taxis. They are so faint you can hardly see them in the daytime, but nonetheless, there they are, slap bang 30 centimetres in front of your face, silently (had anyone found the volume switch?) stealing your attention. Of course they do not run TV as such, they are end- to-end ads, which on average seem at least a month out of date. In late October I was invited to compete for tickets to the Heineken open in September. I had a go and sure enough won. The challenge was to hit a button when a ball came over a pixilated net at you. Not exactly difficult. But did a ticket to the previous month’s Open pop out of the metre with my receipt? Did it heck. As much chance as Agassi himself popping up from the front seat. Oh no, I was asked to SMS a number, send in all my details, and then hope I came up in a draw. I was then asked, “What do you think of this programme?” Er, programme? It was a blinking advertisement, and the way you see if I like that is waiting to see if I buy your product thank you very much Mr A.A.A.A. Impatient. So I looked for the “other” comments box but no chance of that. I was given a choice of telling whichever one of the four A’s agencies was responsible, that I thought it was great, very good, or good. I filled the airwaves, as the seconds ticked off the clock that plaintively begged me to vote, with every four-letter word I could think of, apart from good.

How times have changed since you had to go to a cinema to watch the news. The moving image really is invading our lives. We cannot even say, “I’m staying in to watch TV” nowadays. Maybe I’ll have to borrow the long-established excuse of the fairer sex, and say I am staying home to wash my hair. Then at least I can sit under the TV on the tube and not worry.