Series and Seasons

Quite a number of the present youthful generation would guess correctly, the direction this write-up is about to take. I wouldn’t expect to meet someone telling me he (or she) has not heard about one of Prison Break, twenty-four, Heros and even the never-ending English Premier League, Spanish La liga, the Italian Serie A, and the host of others. I probably might exhaust the little column allocated to me if I wanted to provide a comprehensive list of the various programs classified either as Series or Seasons.

I know I would be raising a lot of dust by saying that quite a number of precious hours have been wasted under the guise of Series and Seasons. I’m not claiming to be a saint, as I am one of the millions of people infected by this epidemic. After my annual time audit, I found out that I had spent an average of 1 hour a day in watching one of Prison Break or the English Premier League which culminates to about 365 hours a year. Did I hear someone scream? I screamed after my estimations, I wondered how many more computer programs I would have written, how many more chapters of the bible I would have studied, how many more productive seminars I would have attended, The list is endless.

When I considered the implicit cost of the time and money, we the male folks (you bet some girls are involved) invest in watching the English premier league and other European leagues or the time spent in watching endless episodes of Desperate Housewives, I wished we could spend them contributing positively to the steady development of Nigeria. Tayo from BOWEN University says she could spend six hours or more in a day watching some episodes of “twenty-four”, while Tunde from OAU Ile-Ife could spend as much as four hours at Amphi theatre, just to get a front seat for the finals of the UEFA champions’ league.

Nowadays, all we find on Television are addictive movies and sports, a situation whereby some Television stations would prefer to broadcast an episode of a popular soap opera to an important national program. Church services are being adjusted to fit into the schedule of the English premier league. Students now miss classes and tutorials in order to watch T.V which was originally supposed to be a leisure activity. I remember when I was preparing for the final paper of my first semester exams and overheard some boys pondering on how they were going to combine their CSC201 exams and the match between Chelsea and Arsenal which were both scheduled for 4pm and true to it, some people spent just 45min of 1 hour 30 min, just to catch the second half of the match. The effects of all these cannot be outlined on a sheet of paper.

I would not fall into the trap of saying that watching T.V, movies and other leisure activities is a bad idea, far from it; in fact, they are necessary for the proper running of the body. The point I’m making is activities that are classified as leisure should remain as such. They should not be allowed to take the bulk of our time neither should they be allowed to interfere with normal work activities. We should realize that Nigeria is in a developing phase and thus, requires a lot of input from us. Much of our time should be spent proffering solutions to the needs of our country. As the old saying goes, “time is money”; this means that it should be invested where it would reap the maximum returns.