Do you really need a 40 inch TV?

You walk past some people’s houses which are two up two down terraced, lovely little havens of peacefulness, but without the room in which to swing a cat and there, spreading across one of the entire walls, is this giant, cinema-sized plasma screen thing.

If it were any bigger, it may well take down the entire wall and next door’s with it. So why do people insist on buying TV screens, LCD etc., and systems which are bigger and better than ever before? What is the fixation for this craze that has swept the modern world?

Blame marketers for it if you like but hey, we don’t have to buy them. Yes we are told that if we buy one of these obscenely huge TVs we can have the life we’ve always wanted and we can watch TV in better definition and never miss our favourite programmes ever again – but no one is actually forcing us to go down to the shops and buy one – so why do we?

Are our eyes all really that bad that we can no longer see our TVs if they are under 40 inches wide? Why do we feel the need to recreate the cinema in our front rooms when we can watch a standard-sized TV perfectly well? Isn’t the message the same? Why do we need to see our favourite characters as outsized versions of the real thing?

Is it the kids? Are they putting us under pressure to buy them? Well, as parents, isn’t it our job to tell them to be quiet and ask for a colouring book instead? Or maybe it’s the parents who want these colossal screens attached to their walls so that they can strain their necks and watch the X-factor in HD, in order to keep up with their neighbours who have just gone one better and bought a 50 inch version.

Can these ever growing, surely ‘genetically modified’ abnormally large TVs be a healthy option for our children? I mean, we rarely go out of the house as it is these days without also encouraging our kids to sit in the house piling on even more weight through eating popcorn and sitting rigid for five hours on the sofa in a room the size of a bus shelter. Staring at these monstrous screens can also surely only be damaging their vision over a long period of time. We’ll breed a generation of visually impaired young adults if we are not careful, who can only recognise a loaf of bread in the shops if it’s 6 feet tall.

By bringing the fun of the cinema into our homes, are we not taking away the pleasure of actually going to the cinema and spending a day out with the family? We’ll be hiring virtual ushers next to stand in our hallways with torches and an ice cream tray, picking up the litter as we go to bed.

Does bigger always mean better? Why is it that we feel the need to go one greater all the time and make things as super duper as we can? Why can we not be satisfied with what we have and accept that the TV we have, which is already 28 inches, is perfectly acceptable and, for the amount of time we actually need it, is more than adequate.

Where will the craze end? Will we have to start raising the ceilings and strengthening walls in the building process of our homes in order to cater for the possibility of a full multi-plex in every room? No, not one in every room….surely not!

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