IELTS Plus: Episode 75 - Television

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the IELTS Plus English podcast. Today we're going to talk about television. A much easier episode today, television. We did study last week and it's not the hardest topic, but we talked about a lot. I gave you some tips, so hopefully you were able to get some value from that. I will make today much simpler. It will be a shorter episode. We'll stick to the topic and hopefully we'll pick up some nice vocabulary such as binge watch, gripping.

hilarious, some lovely adjectives there. These are all the topic-specific vocabulary to talk about television. And this can be found in my textbook. The IELTS Plus total speaking textbook available on www.britplus.net. So go over there, check it out. That's my textbook. I didn't mention it last week, but you can get all the structures in there, all of the vocabulary, and I hope that helps you out. So as I said, shorter episode.

We'll stick to the topic and we'll get straight into part one, question one. Do you prefer watching television alone or with others? I... Nowadays, I prefer watching with others. To be honest, I love watching TV with my family. Now, when I say TV, I am talking about movies, really. We don't watch much television, but... We do have movie night on Sundays where we'll sit down and watch a movie, probably a Disney movie, which sometimes they can be hilarious. I really enjoy them.

So yeah, I like watching TV with my family. Next question, what types of programs do you like to watch? Well, apart from what I just said, you know, if I'm... Certainly if I'm watching alone, I like sitcoms. I have certainly binge-watched Friends and Modern Family. And some other sitcoms like that. But also I really like detective dramas as well. So dramas are what I normally like to watch by myself. Okay.

Uh, let's get into part two. Look how fast we're going. Two minutes. So let's read today's question. Describe your favorite television show. Wonderful. Not too hard. But, okay, yeah. I'm trying to think which one I'm going to go with because as I just mentioned there, I could talk about Friends or Modern Family, but I have another one that I want to talk about. I think that's my favorite TV show. So my two minutes starts now. I'd like to tell you about True Detective about maybe 10 years ago.

True Detective came out and I watched it immediately. I can't remember what platform I used, but I watched it immediately. And it's a detective series. And it's split into the seasons which each have 10 episodes and each season is an individual story. There's no connection. And I watched season one and it... blew my mind that it was so gripping and raw uh it was just the best drama i've ever seen i i would say it's the best drama i've ever seen

And yeah, from that time, I think I watched it. I rewatched it several times. So wonderful. So let me tell you a little more about True Detective. True Detective is about these detectives, of course, in South USA. It's kind of the... Bible Belt region of the USA, maybe central, and a poor area. And it's about cults and drugs and all these very sort of...

This dark underworld of life in America. And it was just so well done. Every episode had a cliffhanger. So you immediately wanted to watch the next episode. So absolutely, I binged watched the whole. thing very very quickly um as i said i i don't know how i saw it it wasn't on regular it wasn't broadcast on regular tv

It must have been on one of these platforms. And then since then, it's been difficult to watch because they've moved it to other platforms. I think it might be on HBO now. But for me personally... Okay, right. Not a bad answer. I quite liked it. As you could hear in the middle there, I struggled to... I paused.

And I struggled to find the vocabulary that I was looking for. I think I talked about dark underworld, which I was happy with in the end. But I suppose the lesson there is, if you are struggling, don't be afraid to... pause for a moment don't panic um and certainly try not to repeat yourself um but i just want to say you know pausing especially

Content-related pausing, where you're just thinking of the right vocabulary, is okay. If you are pausing because you're struggling to... to construct the grammar in a sentence or you know it seems like you're having difficulty uh with the language so a language-related pause you could get penalized penalized means you could get

your marks taken away from you. But in that case, you know, don't panic, pause, think about the word and then continue. Part three, question one, what are the educational benefits?

of watching television? I think it depends, but on the whole, TV shows can be quite informative, especially if you watch documentaries. There's a lot of things you can see on TV, regular TV, that it's difficult to even see on YouTube. You know, of course, everything's pretty much on YouTube now. What comes to my mind is the BBC, or is it the BBC? They're kind of wildlife documentaries with Attenborough and that type of content. The amount that they invest into it and the quality and the...

The shots they get of animals is really incredible and really worth watching. I'd be very happy for my daughter to watch that and get the educational benefits of watching it. OK, let's now got to be a bit careful. Don't get too focused on me during these part threes, but I'm pretty happy with that so far. Next question. How can parents control the type of content their children watch on television? I think the parents can do a few things. Firstly...

You've got to make sure that if you're watching television, your children shouldn't be watching it too late. You know, perhaps through prime time is okay, but... We have the time 9 o'clock, 9pm in the UK. And that time is where it turns into adult content. Definitely, if you're a parent, you've got to be avoiding going beyond 9pm, if that's what you want your children to avoid. And then apart from that, I mean, on television...

it's fairly easy to control because it is time-based. When you talk about platforms, that becomes a bit more tricky. I mean things like Netflix and HBO, Amazon Prime. Because with those, it's not time-based. You can watch anything you want anytime. What you can do on those platforms is ensure your children have their own child's account. And that means that the content is restricted to children's content only. So there are a few different things you can do as a parent.

Good. Last question. Do you think television will be replaced by other forms of media in the future? Wow, that's an interesting question. Yes, I do. If we're talking about traditional television, I do think so. I think we are seeing a massive move towards very short content. And even I didn't think this would happen, but even to the point where people just don't want to watch longer content like dramas or movies.

They're happier to sit there and flick through short videos, which tend to have a maximum of a minute. Now, I don't know on TikTok because I don't use it, but I noticed on YouTube recently, firstly... YouTube shorts are flying. They're doing exceptionally well. which means people like that content. But secondly, and this is a little bit different, but they have extended the time. I don't know exactly, but I noticed that they were going beyond a minute.

Now, I don't know why YouTube did that, but it's nice to see it's getting a little longer. To go back to the question, I think that people's attention span will get shorter and... we will move to shorter and shorter content. And I can't see that trend changing in the future. Good. Okay. Well, that's our episode done for today. I think that was much shorter. Next week is one of my favorites. I love to, my students know this. I love to talk about this topic. It's the future.

Very broad. You know, we are going to be talking. You could talk about anything, right? But we're really going to talk about the future and what the future holds. So very excited for that episode. Have a lovely week this week. Study ridiculously hard. And I'll see you next Monday to talk about the future.