Pandora’s box

While I’ve read plenty of books worse than Television: A Biography, I can’t immediately think of any that were more disappointing. After all, here’s David Thomson — a film critic about whom it’s hard not to use the word ‘doyen’ — looking back on more than 60 years of TV viewing for what should be a magisterial summation of the whole medium. Yet, although some of his analyses of individual shows are as sharp as ever, the overall result is often contradictory, occasionally incomprehensible and at times plain weird.

At first, it seems as if the main problem will merely be the traditional snootiness of the intellectual movie buff towards telly, and the damage it supposedly does to all of us by offering only mind-numbing
reassurance. Television, Thomson argues in the introduction, is like an electric light: the whole point is simply whether it’s on or not, with ‘watching, criticism, judgment, meaning — all those esteemed procedures’ consigned to pre-TV history. In fact, this proves to be an argument that he returns to regularly — but only when he’s not explaining that ‘I watch a lot of television’, or when he’s not criticising, judging or finding meaning in what he’s seen.

In that same introduction, Thomson also rubbishes the idea that his book will, or ever could, be a biography of TV. ‘The historical approach,’ he says sternly, ‘is misleading’ (although perhaps not as misleading as his subtitle). Nonetheless, it’s impossible to guess at this stage just how random the next 400 pages will be, with many of the sections, paragraphs and even sentences proceeding by means of what could be most kindly be described as free association — and less kindly as a series of wild non-sequiturs.