Mind you, the very first television broadcast, on June 1, 1960, went for less time than it takes to watch the very first Lord of the Rings film which ran for three hours 48 minutes.
The first broadcast (which only those in the Auckland area were able to pick up) started up at 7.30pm and went for just three hours.
Not much chance of chucking a couple of movies on.
I honestly can't remember when I first watched a film appear on the small screen but I suspect it was a black and white effort made in England.
A vague memory is of a chap called up for the war and I remember a scene of him stepping onto a troop train with his mum and dad waving their hankies to him.
Might have been around 1965 I reckon.
And I once saw The Wizard of Oz on television although the constant diversions from the yellow brick road into the lands of soap powders, butter, cheese and discounted ovens and fridges was unsettling.
In this era of television the feature film is a very firm part of a channel's foundations.
They also make up the entire content of seven channels on the pay-to-watch front ... 80 to 90 in all over any 24-hour period.
Add the healthy swag of them on the free-to-air channels, especially across a Saturday, and it gets close to three figures.
That's an awful lot of movies ... and an awful lot of television time but then in TV these days most channels just do not close down.
Instead, they switch the auto pilots on ... auto pilots called infomercials.
Now time is a very important part of life because it is not selective on how much it delivers and to whom.
It's all the same.
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months are all the same time despite who you are and where you are.
It's not like a wage or salary ... it is absolutely universal and untouchable for one and all.
And basically, we lose a third of it to the act of sleeping.
And I daresay there are those who spend around another quarter of it watching television?
Five to six hours a day?
I watch about three to four hours a day, on average, and of course that depends on what is actually being shown.
I can't watch television just for the sake of it.
I'd rather read a book.
I rarely watch a film ... because they simply take too long and I tend to get distracted and frustrated by the breaks ... as well as things like the fridge and the toaster.
Buy hey, if you start watching and that strange thing called a "hook" manages to get you then time can become a victim.
In terms of what's lining up for our little home cinemas over the weekend there is one made-for-the-big-screen standout.
It is film-making at its best and it is based on a true and terrible story, and you realise you are watching something special when you start to feel the occasional chill of fear rippling through the old system.
This is Hotel Rwanda, a production shared between the UK and South Africa, about an extraordinarily brave hotel manager who saved many, many lives during three months of genocide which swept across Rwanda.
He took in and stoically defended more than a thousand Tutsi refugees whose lives would otherwise have been wiped out by the Hutu militia.
There are no storyline compromises here and the cast is quite superb in telling a story which is both startling and frightening - and Don Cheadle as hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina is an absolute knock-out.
It is one of about a dozen films on the free-to-air menu during Saturday and Sunday nights, so there is clearly plenty of cinematic fodder about.
ON THE BOX
● Bill Connolly's Route 66, Choice at 6.30pm Saturday: Yes it is a repeat of course but it is one of those repeats which unlike some is well worth taking in for one good reason - Connolly and his production and preparation crew have done their homework on finding characters along his three-wheeled travels who are, indeed, characters.
Last Saturday night's outing saw him arrive in a neighbourhood off Route 66 which had been smashed to pieces by a twister.
The locals, remarkably, were upbeat and simply determined to get things up and going again. Connolly was genuinely lost for words.
● All Blacks vs Australia, Sky Sport 1 (live) from 6.30pm (Prime at 8.30pm): The match it would now be seriously difficult to make any decent money out of with the TAB ... although I wonder what they'd be paying for the All Blacks to post a second 50-plus pointer score two weekends running?
I might look at that ... I've got a spare 50 cents in the car somewhere.
● Country Calender, TV1 at 7pm Sunday: This production is also a fine location for the uncovering of interesting individuals and characters.
Farming, indeed any commercial outdoors enterprise which revolves around both the demand for produce as well as the twists and quirks of the climate, is challenging, and I am slightly in awe of the way those who work the land stoically take the battle on.
I simply could not.
But in this rural outing, the police officer who while helping out an elderly farmer took a shine to the farming landscape figured he could.
So he decided to buy the farm.
