Jim Kershner : Without remote, many of us would flip

A new on-screen cable TV guide will show six screens simultaneously, which will make channel surfing unnecessary.

To which I can only respond: Never!

Nothing – nothing – will ever make the truly dedicated channel-surfer stop.

I am a clicker, a roamer, a confirmed seeker of the elusive Something Better on Some Other Channel. I can pound my way through 88 channels the way Beethoven could pound the 88 keys. As much as I hate to conform to a gender stereotype, I am one of those annoying guys you hear about who refuses to settle on any program for more than 30 seconds.

Put a clicker in my hand and I will use it compulsively, repeatedly and with great virtuosity honed by hours of experience. The only thing that will ever make me stop is a dead battery in the remote, and that will cause a delay of only two minutes. I have a fresh, emergency battery supply ready at all times.

I can’t help myself. Sometimes I’ll turn on the TV and be perfectly content with what I’m watching, let’s say, the NBA playoffs. But then, inevitably, comes a timeout. My right hand grabs the remote, sometimes without my conscious knowledge, and before I know it, I’m skipping through BET, CMT and yes, even QVC. Eventually, I land on some black-and-white Raymond Massey movie which has me mesmerized for upwards of ten seconds. Only later do I remember I was supposed to be watching a basketball game. By the time I get back to it, I’ve missed the only part of the game worth watching, the bench-clearing brawl.

I’ve been trying to analyze my own remote obsession and I’ve come up with two main theories about why I, and countless other Americans, are afflicted in this way:

Theory No. 1: We hate commercials.

Something in our brain recognizes one of the immutable truths of existence: We have been allocated only a certain amount of time on earth, and we should never squander it watching a Money Tree payday loan ad featuring a talking caterpillar. So whenever an ad hits the screen, we are off on a journey to find some channel, any channel, which is not showing a commercial, even if that channel happens to be showing something even more time-wasting and soul-destroying, such as cable news.

However, even the most skilled channel-surfers sometimes find themselves confronted with Ad Synchronization Convergence, in which a Madison Avenue conspiracy has succeeded in running ads simultaneously on every channel (and a pledge drive on PBS). In this case, we have no choice but to hit the restroom.

Theory No. 2: We are cockeyed optimists who believe there is always something better over the next horizon and/or the next channel. Why we persist in this unrealistic hope is beyond me. It’s simply an ingrained genetic trait, like male-pattern baldness.

Certainly, we haven’t learned optimism from any actual experience. Actual experience has taught us, over and over again, that there is always something even stupider on the next channel. A typical channel-surfing session goes something like this:

“ Start with a World War II battle.

“ Switch to hyperactive children performing some kind of kiddie hip-hop.

“ Switch to dramatic true story of a hailstorm in Iowa.

“ Switch to a professor explaining intricacies of irrigation in the Klamath Valley, 1898.

“ Switch to something about Anna Nicole Smith’s spawn.

“ Switch to some guy forming meat loaf.

“ Switch to guy selling paintings of thatched cottages.

“ Switch to guy brooding moodily over poker hand.

“ Switch to Larry King conducting incisive interview with SpongeBob SquarePants.

Clearly, we would have been better off sticking with the World War II battle. But the by time we figure that out, the History Channel has moved on to the Black Plague.

There is, of course, an obvious solution to this problem: Stop watching TV altogether. After all, we are allocated only a certain amount of time on earth and etc., etc., etc.

That’s all very high-minded and everything, but sometimes a guy just needs to relax by flipping his way through 97 different channels. I can’t really explain why, but it’s a soothing way to kill two-and-a-half minutes.