Tom Sutcliffe: Social media is TV's saviour, not its enemy

Social Studies: The watercooler moments simply won't wait until you're at the watercooler the next day

It's often fun when statistics collide. It happened yesterday when a Thinkbox report on television viewing habits in Britain coincided with the release of an Australian study into the epidemiology of the couch potato.

One of the take-home facts from the former was that the average television viewer is now taking in 51 seconds a day of television more than at the same time last year. And the killer stat from the latter was the suggestion that every hour of television watched equated to 22 minutes of life lost. (Don't panic, incidentally – the latter fact was only arrived at after aggregating the figures in a dubious but eye-catching way. If you watch your hour on a gym monitor you'll be fine, and even if you don't, getting up in the ad breaks and going to put the kettle on should counteract the effect.) If my sums are right, though – and their sums are anything more than tendentious figure-juggling – that tiny daily increment in viewing equates to another 18.7 seconds off of our average life expectancy.

It can certainly feel as if the life spirit is ebbing out of you when you watch some programmes – and there are even some that make the idea of an early death sound almost merciful. But leaving that aside, there was one intriguing detail in the Thinkbox report. The BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board) figures on which its report was based suggested a small increase in the viewing of live television. Since it's a marketing organisation for commercial television, Thinkbox naturally presented this as a "drive to live" – anxious to reassure advertisers who dread the impact of time-shifted viewing and the opportunity it offers to skip adverts altogether.

That's surely overstating it. But their suggestion that social media had reinforced the viewing of live television rather than further eroded it feels broadly true. Whether it's Question Time you're watching or The X Factor – the ability to comment in real-time on a broadcast while an invisible network of friends or followers joins in really is a genuinely new kind of television experience.

Thinkbox also speculated that people had gone back to live viewing because there was no other reliable way of avoiding plot spoilers. I'm less sure about that, though it's true that it's hard to imagine a contemporary remake of that classic Likely Lads episode in which they struggled to avoid hearing the result of a football match until they watched the broadcast in the evening. These days they wouldn't really stand a chance. And even if you disconnected from the digital world entirely to preserve the pleasure of a plot twist, you'd lose out on the pleasure of sharing your reaction to it.

These days the watercooler moments simply won't wait until you're at the watercooler the next day. There are downsides to this revolution – with some comedy and drama the division of attention between what's happening on the big screen and the little one on your lap is detrimental. It's far harder to lose yourself in a programme than it used to be. But overall it's a bonus – a social High Definition which makes the experience of watching television brighter, sharper, more colourful. Odd really that an innovation many television professionals feared might steal its audience has actually helped to consolidate it.

Greece isn't out of cash just yet

Two weeks in Greece suggested the country is still some way off societal collapse. Rubbish was collected with a regularity that few London boroughs could match, and even the rough track down to the villa we were staying in had its bushes trimmed while we were there. But I did find myself wondering whether the Greek government might consider economising just a little on air defence. It's quite hard to get an accurate figure for the hourly flying costs of advanced military aircraft but I'd guess the daily overflights (sometimes two or three patrols a day) must burn through limited state funds at a terrifying rate. An F-16, for example, one of the Hellenic Air Force's aircraft, costs something in the region of $6,000 per hour to put in the air.

Some military cutbacks would clearly be a false economy: I spent one contented afternoon watching two airforce Canadairs shuttling steadily between the bay and a nearby hillside, putting out a fire in the olive groves. But it's difficult to believe that much would go wrong if the Greeks throttled back on their aerial displays of potency. It looks like an unaffordable bit of military grandstanding right now. Or is it, perhaps, that the Government doesn't much fancy the idea of air force officers with enough time on their hands to wonder whether they could run things better?

Lynx helicopter? It's just what I wanted

Talking of military economies I can thoroughly recommend the Disposal Services Authority website (edisopals.com), through which the MoD sells off its unwanted kit. This is less for the bargains available than for its comic combination of standard online shopping rhetoric with a highly specialised inventory.

I understand that there may be someone out there who wants a "Genuine ex-MOD Luffing Crane" (all 20 tonnes of it). But are they really likely to add it to their wishlist? ("You know, I just can't decide right now – it's either that or the R400 F Snowblower"). And I love the idea that to purchase a Lynx Mk7 Helicopter Flight Simulator, you first have to press a button titled "Add to Cart". Order now to avoid disappointment.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk