David Mitchell and Stephen Fry, just to pick a few names out of a large number, are intelligent people who appear on British television regularly. It is not unfair to suggest that they themselves probably do not watch much television which will account for their higher-than-average intellect. (Their intellect my actually be why they do not watch television).

I recently read Peter Hitchens’ book The Abolition of Britain which among other factors points toward television as the reason intelligence is waning in recent decades. If these intelligent people were raised not watching television and not falling into the trappings of Hollywood films and much of popular culture, should we aim to not be involved with such things? The evidence Fry and Mitchell offer seems to suggest that we must step beyond that which is popular at the present age i.e., the best album of the year or the series everyone is talking about.

There is more to life and more to the world than these flashes in the pan. There is little knowledge or understanding that can be gained from such series or film – why then do Fry and Mitchell (along with many others) depend on television and popular books in order to get their ideas across? Well, there is an ability of these things to give thoughts to a lot of people all at once. The complex ideas can be condensed and simplified to allow the widest possible amount of people to enter into a world they wouldn’t otherwise have entered. This may be the magic of these intelligent people – they bring the importance of knowledge into a world that is its opposite. They could be thought of as a gateway into a world far beyond the momentary, emotional and mere sensation. They are in many ways outsiders who have infiltrated a world in order to signpost the way out of that world towards something else.

We should however be careful not to jump to the conclusion that watching the programs in which Fry and Mitchell appear in are a replacement for knowledge and understanding. What occurs through such an assumption is that the television does our knowing for us. This is a similar claim to the one Mark Fischer made on his blog K-Punk about Wall-E doing our criticism and anti-capitalism for us while we sit and consume the film unthinkingly.