"Leave it to Beaver!"“Reality TV”? Please! You know I sat down to watch television the other night and one of those shows was on. I watched for a while, but when they began eating curdled blood balls, hidden in a plate full of live night crawlers, without using their hands, I had to turn it off. It reminded me too much of my job.I mean, hey, If I turn on the TV I want to see fantasy not reality. I don’t want to watch a group of oddballs voting on whether or not they’re going to vote some other oddball off an island while they sweat and play games like I used to play in junior high. Nor do I want to watch some idiot kid trying to stay true to his ‘partner’ while being flirted with by somebody that is only after fame and fortune. That’s all too real for me.Nope. When I turn on television I want to escape reality. It’s always been like that. From my earliest TV watching days, I knew it was fake and I liked it that way. I knew the bad guys weren’t really all that bad, and when the good guy beat ‘em up, they were okay, it wasn’t real. It was fun. I liked those shows where the kids wanted to do the right thing, help out their over-worked father and pay for the car when they ran it off the road. I liked fantasy. I guess that’s where I’m most comfortable, in a make believe world. That’s where I spend most of my time anyway.I liked watching shows like Father Knows Best, and Leave It To Beaver. But I knew it wasn’t real. I knew there just weren’t any teachers like Miss Landers and that when I became a teenager, there’d be no Mary Ellen having her mother call my mother so I’d ask her out. But it was a fun fantasy.If they really wanted to do real ‘Reality TV’ they’d do a show like this. In the first half, invite an over-worked guy about my age on and give him $5,000 to spend anyway he wants. Then the audience could vote on whether he’d get his adolescent son braces, pay for his daughter’s wedding, or buy himself a new boat. Now that’d be reality. Now, I’d buy the boat.In the last half of the show they could just line up five recliners, set five hapless, middle-aged guys in the chairs and give ‘em each a remote control and a television. Then we’d see which one could stay awake the longest.These days when our phone rings and my daughter runs up to me breathlessly, it’d be a fantasy to think she was going to ask me my opinion on some teenage thing. Usually she’s running up to me to ask where mom is, because, evidently, father doesn’t know best. But that’s just because he’s out in fantasyland, wishing there was a good TV show on.
