Too much TV not a good thing
Call me snobbish but I have never hidden my disappointment with Chinese television. In general, that is. I am not ruling out the occasional decent show.
When I flip through the 60-something channels, I rarely stumble upon anything to my taste. Not educational programming like Discovery or PBS. For that, I have to trek to a certain stall in southern China whose owner has a warehouse of great discs.
Recently, I got a box set of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, a BBC series that functioned as the "open sesame" to a world of Western civilization for me, while I was a graduate student in Guangzhou, in the early 1980s. My German-born English professor borrowed canisters of films from the British Embassy and for the first time I realized that great art does not necessarily spring from class struggle.
