My mum’s favourite TV show when she was a child was The Flowerpot Men.
As she tells it, she would sit in front of the TV watching the test card, waiting eagerly for the programme to start.
She would sit entranced for 15 minutes, and then it would end, the test card would come back on, and that was it for Bill & Ben until the next day.
That was the media environment of the early 1960s.
A few years ago I suggested to my mum that she might like to try out Duolingo. She has always wanted to learn another language and never got very far. I quite like Duolingo and thought she might too.1
After downloading it and trying it out she rang me up. “This app is AMAZING! I would have LOVED this as a child! But what I don’t understand is – it’s so good and so much fun – why aren’t all the kids on it all the time? Why aren’t they all fluent in ten languages?”
Because the kids today have more options than watching a ropey black-and-white puppet show.