Unlike Pope Francis I can’t actually remember when I consciously gave up television and I have in fact watched it occasionally in other people’s houses on various occasions. But it was probably at least as long ago as he, twenty odd years ago. When I went to university there wasn’t a television in our room and there was an awful lot going on; fun stuff, more fun than looking at a screen. And at that point I broke the habit. It’s a bit like giving up sugar in your tea for Lent: the first time is awful; by the next Lent it’s easier; by the end, it’s normal. And so, term by term, I just lost interest. And I’ve never gone back.
Being a journalist, I did have a crisis of conscience at missing out on party political broadcasts, so during one election – can’t remember which – I got a black-and-white television from a friend. I took the view that with a screen that small and in black and white there wouldn’t be much temptation there. But I got rid of it shortly afterwards, without regret. From teenage addiction to outright antipathy – it just took a bit of time.
The thing about a telly is that it dominates a room. If you look at an old fashioned sort of living room, the chairs are turned to the fire; that’s the real focal point, and since you’re all turned the same way, there’s the possibility of talking to each other. In a modern living room, the chairs are turned to the screen. It may of course not stay that way now that the young are watching their own screens, perhaps in their own rooms, but as things stand, the telly dominates a home, especially a flat. It’s not true of very grand homes of course, where the telly is stuffed into a tiny room which you don’t really want to hang out in, but for most people, it’s the object round which everything revolves.
My not having a telly is a matter for complete incomprehension among my relatives, and not a little pity for my children. (Don’t worry about them; they’re on my laptop doing Minecraft or similar.) I’ve been offered umpteen sets and turned them all down. My children’s response when they go to visit my mother in Ireland is to put themselves in front of the wretched screen and watch the cartoon network all day long. Do not try and tell me that you only possess a telly for the nature documentaries; I don’t believe you. Occasionally I too look at telly in my mother’s and frankly, absolutely the only thing I think I’ve missed is Graham Norton. Honestly, nothing else. Period drama is especially grim.
I do, however, listen to radio most of the time, as does my husband, who wasn’t, I fear, consulted about the matter. And so I flit between radios 3 and 4 with forays into Classic FM. For live stuff, Radio 5 live is a cracker. I did watch one of the leaders’ debates with my neighbour downstairs before the election, which was interesting, but I didn’t learn so very much more than I did from listening to the earlier debate on the radio. You can tell an awful lot from people’s voices, as my old friend T.E.Utley, formerly deputy editor of the Telegraph, and blind from childhood, used to observe. And, with grateful thanks to licence fee payers, may I just observe that you can listen to radio for free.
I gather people spend about three hours a day on television and probably more on other screens – tragically I don’t have a smartphone either. Which just makes you wonder: how do these people catch up with the business of living in the rest of the time? God knows I rarely get round to the washing up as it is. If your evenings are taken up with the dumbest medium known to man, how do you ever do it?
Comments