AND I WON’T MENTION MY TEN THOUSAND HOURS IN TRAINING [45]

I own an alto saxophone, having written about the allure of them previously [www.leighspence.net/2016/07/you-better-play-that-sax.html], but I cannot yet play it. One day, I hope to play it like an artist uses a paintbrush, but I am aware of how much practice it will take to get there…  mainly because a number has now been put on it.

The number ten thousand, to me, is a number that is “just about right,” a big enough number to be counted as a “big number.” If you were going on a TV game show, a jackpot of nine thousand pounds sounds like a big enough number, but TEN thousand... We do many things thousands of times in our lives, but if you can look someone in the face at the end of the day, and say you walked TEN THOUSAND STEPS that day, it sounds like an achievement.

Likewise, if you can play the saxophone like Clarence Clemons or David Sanborn, it is because you spent as many as ten thousand hours practising: breaking that time down into a nine-to-five, five-day work week, minus an hour per day for lunch and breaks, and six weeks’ holiday a year, ten thousand hours becomes SIX YEARS, and a couple of months – if I start now, I may be up to the E Street Band’s standard once I hit forty years old, provided Bruce Springsteen doesn’t retire by then.

Ten thousand sounds an easy number to pick, but these two uses of it have reasoning behind them: ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, a Japanese company made a pedometer named “manpo-kei” – “10,000-step meter”- which they later backed up with research that advised walking this number each day helps maintain a healthy weight. This target has since been taken up by the World Health Organisation, and the NHS considers a walker of seven to ten thousand steps per day to be “moderately active”, having walked twice the national average to get into that range.

However, practising for ten thousand hours is more difficult to prove, and even harder to justify. The figure was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2008 book “Outliers,” which looked at why some people are able to achieve more than others. However, people took his writing to mean this number is a cut-off point, where you become an “expert” upon reaching it. The original 1993 research paper, snappily titled, ”The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert  Performance,” talked of this figure being an average – some people just get the hang of things more quickly than others. Its writer, the professor Anders Ericsson, later contended that Gladwell didn’t mention the practice had to be “deliberate” – the name of that essay, “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists,” makes it sound like the rigour needed to do a proper job is something you cannot teach, even if you could try to learn.

What should I do? Practice makes perfect, but practice means pushing yourself – keep walking that bit further than the last time, and learn your major and minor scales on your saxophone. Ten thousand is a target, but once you reach it, set a new one.  

THE SUN ALWAYS SHINES ON TV [23]

At 9.30am on Saturday 27^th August 2016, following the Rio Olympics and Paralympics, ITV “switched off” their channels for an hour, affecting around a million viewers, supporting a Team GB effort to get people outside and be active, rather than watch another episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” I am usually out the house by that time on a Saturday morning anyway but, at least, I was already doing what Team GB hoped for, even if my bracing walk was only to the shops.

ITV’s hour of non-broadcasting is usually what you expect the BBC to do, given their years of being the go-to point when there is a national event, especially when ITV plan to keep us rooted to the living room sofa by building new sets in Salford for “Coronation Street.” In late 2017, the soap opera will broadcast for six episodes a week, complementing the six episodes of “Emmerdale,” five of “Hollyoaks,” “Doctors,” ”Neighbours” and “Home and Away,” and four of “EastEnders” – that is a lot of time spent watching nearly-people have a go at each other.

Despite being able to watch television on mobile devices nowadays, the demands TV makes on your attention roots you to the spot far more than radio does, which is why I didn’t mention the six episodes per week of “The Archers” earlier. Perhaps, the only way to get people out of the house would be for someone, or Ofcom, to mandate that all TV is turned off entirely, like every Thursday or, say the whole of July, so everyone can go on holiday in the knowledge they won’t be missing their favourite shows…

This is what Iceland used to do but, then again, their television service only started in 1966, by which time TV was already supplanting other forms of entertainment in the UK, especially going out to the cinema. The people of Iceland usually holiday in July, so it made sense that TV would not be watched during that time, although the annual blackout ended in 1983. Likewise, the intention to promote human interaction by keeping Thursdays free fizzled out by 1987, as TV integrated itself into Icelandic life – however, for a country where one in every ten people will publish a book during their lifetime, the place for TV in Iceland appears to be firmly in the corner.

There used to be restrictions in the UK on how long TV stations could broadcast – only fifty hours per week, with some exceptions – until 1972, but even when they ended, programmes only really appeared when people were there to watch them, which was mainly in the evenings and at weekends. Regular shows at breakfast time took until 1983 to appear, BBC One still had breaks during the day until 1986, and twenty-four broadcasting was only achieved, by ITV, in 1988. At every point, there had to be a justification for the effort and, with schedules filled with repeats and lifestyle shows outside of primetime, and the continued existence of “The Jeremy Kyle Show,” it looks a bit difficult to keep that up.

Online, on-demand TV helps our chosen form of leisure fit around our time, but breaking with routine makes it far more difficult. Despite ITV’s best efforts in August, there was always something else to watch.