Interest-free credit

When did you last experience a boring Sunday afternoon? If you’re over 16, probably not since you were last 16 and stuck at home, raindrops sliding down the window pane, nothing on TV until five o’clock, nowhere to go because everywhere is shut. But boredom, says Phill Jupitus, has become an endangered emotion. Now that we have smartphones, at a gentle swipe, the touch of a button, we have access to any amount of diversion, 24 hours a day. We need never find ourselves with nothing to do, nothing to read that takes our fancy, no one to talk to. He’s not happy about this. In Being Bored: The Importance of Doing Nothing (produced by Luke Doran) he looks to Tony Hancock (and his ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’ sketch), Reggie Perrin (who once, out of petulant boredom, orders ravioli for every course at his local Italian) and the Boring Conference to explain why we should be cherishing and preserving that sensation of frustration, futility and general fed-upness that are boredom’s peculiar characteristics.

Every year a sell-out crowd gathers in London to hear lectures about toast, barcodes, the shipping forecast (yes, even that heartland of Radio 4 life has been declared an interest-free zone), to celebrate ‘the mundane, ordinary, obvious and overlooked’. The conference organisers promise that ‘nothing of any value or importance will be discussed’. Instead participants will be persuaded of the wonder that can be found in the minutiae of life, those details of everyday existence usually regarded as too dull, too repetitive, too quotidian to be spoken about, let alone celebrated and given star billing.

Jupitus yearns for that time when, growing up in suburban Essex, he and his mates wandered up and down the high street, too old for the swings but too young for the pub.