No TV since 1988 - Courier Newspaper

NO TV: Southborough resident Andrew Lohmann has not owned a television for 24 years

NEIGHBOURS may have bagged the 5.35pm slot to which most of the country was glued and Crossroads with its wobbly stage sets was in its last year - but one man from Southborough wasn't watching.

In 1988 Andrew Lohmann. 53, ditched his television for good.

He said he had developed “a terrible habit of watching television” to the detriment of a social life and engaging with the world around him.

The electronics engineer, who told the Courier he had never seen footage of the passenger jets exploding into the World Trade Center in 2001 and was only “aware” Britain's Got Talent was a programme, said: “When I left home I thought. don’t bother with the TV. I had a lovely flat in the town centre, lovely neighbours and lots of things to do."

As a child with rheumatoid arthritis he had watched ample television and was inspired by Tomorrow’s World, The World About Us, Life on Earth and Doctor Who. He began “making things with batteries” aged five and those early programmes led him into engineering.

But in his twenties he got in to “bad habits” with the set in the living room.

“It was easy to just watch TV. It drew me in,” he said.

“I was a bit ‘junk TV’ because I was at home. I didn’t read a lot- I am dyslexic - so I was taking other peop1e’s impressions of things on the television. It was just too easy to watch it."

Minus the box, he became involved in “environmental stuff He campaigned for nuclear disarmament with the local branch of CND which led to a few hours in the cells at Tunbridge Wells police station in the late 1980s - and later worked with Electronics for Peace, a group of scientists concerned about the military’s dominance of electronic technology.