ABSTRACT
In 1976, a group of friends from Los Angeles who often gathered together in order to indulge in hour-long sessions of television viewing, decided to call themselves ‘couch potatoes’. With tongue-in-cheek publications such as The Official Couch Potato Handbook (Mingo 1983) and The Couch Potato Guide to Life (Mingo et al. 1985), they started a mock-serious grassroots viewers’ movement that promoted the view that watching television is at least as good as, and perhaps even better than, many other ways of spending leisure time. In their view, people should stop considering television viewing as bad and harmful, something they should be ashamed or secretive about. At least television viewing does not cause air pollution!1 A few years later, the term ‘couch potato’ has become so popular in America and other English-speaking countries that it has come to denote television audiencehood as such. Now there is at least a standard catch-phrase people can use to refer to that activity which is so mundane and familiar and yet so little understood.
