Television in Russia and in Britain

Pahomova Julia 10 "A"

 

Television now plays an important role in our life. Of course it influences the way people look at the world and share their views. There are advantages and disadvantages on television.

Television in our country offers us about 18 channels so the programmes are various. We can say the same about British television, but in Britain there are more people who have satellite television. There are special channels on it: sport channel, music channel, news, cartoons, children's channel and even special channel for animals.

Very often the programmes are bad. Sometimes they show too much violence in films and new programmes. There are more American cruel thrillers than ours. Our children can't find the difference between goodness and evil because they watch such films and study to solve problems with gore and murders. Russian films show us reality of wars but they don't try to imagine such horrors as Americans do.

There is also too much advertisement. When the adverts come on, we always switch over to see what's on the other channels. Of course it is the most effective way of making things known to people, but I think that all programmes should be broken by adverts. It wastes our time. In Russian television the adverts can compose more than 30 % of a film time or a chat show, but in Britain it contains about 10 %.

I think that soap operas in Britain are more reality than in Russia. It treats controversial themes like teenage pregnancy, run away children, drugs and race relations in a realistic way. The scripts and direction of the serial move very fast and it is interesting to compare it with Russian television.

Nearly all students in Britain watch TV during the week and almost 1/3 of teenagers watch TV more than 7 hours on weekends so do ours.