Maricel: Too much TV is bad for kids

A few weeks ago, Maricel Laxa, who writes a parenting column for the Lifestyle section of this paper, met up with me to share the good news about the Philippine Parenting Convention she and husband Anthony Pangilinan are putting up at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel from March 13 and 14.

During that meeting with Maricel, we talked about the influence of media on today’s young generation and I already shared with the Philippine STAR readers in my Feb. 28 column her views regarding this matter.

In our conversation, Maricel talked about the dangers of too much television (especially if unmonitored) for children. She related to me how she used to spend 18 hours in front of the tube and how it later caused her to have dizzy spells.

I had a totally different experience about TV viewing as a kid. Allow me to share it with you this time:

Just like most homes back then (and I’m not telling when – he-he-he), there was only one TV set (usually installed in the living room) for each family. Well, some had two (the other one was in the bedroom of the parents). But that was only for the very rich.

Since we were not a rich family (but how I ached to have come from one), we only had one TV set and it came in a built-in wooden cabinet that had doors that my father would padlock every time he wanted to regulate our TV viewing.

Television back then was used to discipline us kids. Whenever the performance in school of one of us dipped (it was usually me), TV viewing was limited. But when we’d fight (often violently) over what TV show to watch, the TV set would be padlocked for a good number of time. My older siblings at least had the telephone to entertain them. But I was a bit too young to have phone pals. Atari? These gadgets didn’t come around until I was in college. With nothing else to do, I read books, the encyclopedia (I have to give it to my parents for encouraging us to read) and pored over maps. (At a young age, I swear I already knew the capital of Aruba – Oranjestad.)

In time, as we kids grew older, the rules about watching TV eased up. There was really no use regulating TV viewing because my eldest brother, for instance, was no longer interested in watching TV. He was hardly home to begin with and my parents would have bought him all the TV sets he wanted just to see his shadow in the house.

And irony of ironies, just when there was no one to fight with about which TV show to watch, my parents installed a TV set in each bedroom.

Since I am the youngest and was relegated to staying home (at that age I had nowhere to go to), I was the one who lapped up this kind of setup. Wow, a TV set right at the foot of my bed. I would watch television with a canister of Chippy and those Jack ’n Jill Chiz Curls came in plastic jars at P3 each back then – believe it or not.) That to me was what life was all about.

Eventually I went to college and while I was busy working on my journalism degree, I decided to start writing professionally. And it didn’t really come as a surprise for my family that when I started writing, I wrote about TV (for a weekly television magazine called TV Times).

In 1992, the Cultural Center of the Philippines decided to publish a book about Lino Brocka. The book was going to be divided into different chapters – one of which was going to be devoted to Brocka’s career on television.

Then CCP artistic director, Dr. Nicanor Tiongson, assigned the TV chapter to Nestor U. Torre, who politely said no. (He went on to do the chapter on Brocka as an actor’s director.)

I was the second choice and I gladly accepted only to regret it later. I could understand why Mr. Torre didn’t want to do the TV chapter. Research was not only difficult. It was impossible. TV stations then didn’t have archives and there were no books on local television.

My only option then was to start calling up people who worked with Brocka on TV. I knew he once had a drama anthology in the old BBC-2. My good friend Chit Guerrero, a young pioneer of that station, referred me to Becca Cabrera. Chit said that Becca was the executive producer of Lino Brocka Presents. But when I called up Ms. Cabrera, she denied having worked with Brocka. She said how she wished she did (after all, Brocka was the Brocka) and promised to make calls to her BBC-2 friends to find out who was the executive producer of Lino Brocka Presents. She said she would call me again.

The call from Becca Cabrera came fast – only five minutes later. On the other line, she laughingly told me, "You know what? My husband overheard our phone conversation and he said that yes, I was the executive producer of Lino Brocka Presents!" In spite of her kindness and politeness, there was nothing I could get from her because she couldn’t remember even the basic fact that she was the executive producer of that Brocka show.

Didn’t they even keep copies of the scripts? Oh, yes they did. But these were all kept in the studio complex tennis court where each page was left to rot. My research was doomed.

Mercifully, on one of my visits to the CCP office, I saw some of the newspaper clippings that were saved by the late Lino Brocka himself while he was still working for TV. The information there wasn’t much – only the episode titles and the list of guest stars of a horror show called Malikmata.

Bingo! Looking at the lineup of guests, I was able to reconstruct in my head the story line of each episode because I watched these myself during those Chippy days of my youth. From there, I was able to start working on my assigned chapter and with a lot of interviews with people like Charo Santos, Celeste Legaspi, Hilda Koronel and the late Bobbie de la Cruz (executive producer of Hilda).

At another phase in my writing career, I decided to write about old TV shows and at some point I could not proceed because this was the period when my parents regulated my TV viewing. For quite some time, I bitterly resented them for that.

But now that I’ve matured, I’ve realized that my parents didn’t really make a mistake about regulating my TV viewing as a kid. (To begin with, how would they have known that I was going to grow up to be a TV reviewer?) By limiting my TV time, they put a balance in my life – and that’s how it should be. (With the TV shut off, I entertained myself reading books.)

More importantly, by regulating my TV watching, they installed discipline in me.

Early in my career, I had a lot of friends who led a bohemian kind of life. They were writers–very good ones. But they had no sense of deadline.

I wasn’t the best writer then (not even now), but I had the most number of writing assignments because editors knew I was disciplined enough to meet my deadline. Early in life, I became an editor because publishers knew I had the discipline to be able to put every issue to bed – on time.

As a child who grew up in front of the TV set, I am grateful to television for serving as my babysitter for many years. I thank television for serving me in good stead – especially since I went into TV reviewing (and now, hosting).

But I also thank my parents for regulating my TV viewing back then and for constantly reminding me not to believe all the things we see on television because not everything on TV is right.