Leading Article: Turn off and tune out
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One of the great British annual rites, along with the August bank holiday and the Oxford and Cambridge University boat race, is the post-Christmas festival of moaning about the lousy telly.
Why don't they ever put anything decent on, except for Wallace and Gromit? So goes the refrain, as repetitive as a football fan's chant. Perhaps an impish spirit of sadism does indeed enter the hearts of television programmers, inspiring them to save the very worst for the very end of the year, precisely because they know they hold the nation effectively captive for days in a row. A form of collective punishment for our failure to watch worthier programmes, then. Well, true to this newspaper's tradition of viewing the glass as half full rather than half empty, we are happy to point out a little mentioned benefit of boring Christmas television: the duller it gets, the more people will turn it off. The art of conversation will revive and reading will boom. A cheering thought for the last days of the year.
- 1 Matthew Norman: There's always the Human Rights Act, Trevor
- 2 Mark Steel: If religion is 'marginal', I'm the Pope
- 3 Hamish McRae: Living standards will start to get better sooner than you think
- 4 Christina Patterson: The struggle against police racism has just got a lot harder
- 5 Kate Allen: It's time for America to put an end to this shameful scandal
- 6 The Daily Cartoon
- 7 Dominic Lawson: Spare me these orgies of self-congratulation
- 1 Spotify: 1 million plays, £108 return
- 2 How Koscielny became prince of the Emirates
- 3 Apple admits it has a human rights problem
- 4 Mark Steel: If religion is 'marginal', I'm the Pope
- 5 No secularism please, we're British
- 6 Lightning kills an entire football team
- 7 Matthew Norman: There's always the Human Rights Act, Trevor
- 8 Special report: The hungry generation
- 9 I was born to be a killer. Every night I see the Devil in my dreams
- 10 Six Grammys, five years off: Adele puts love before career
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