The other day I had my TV aerial removed. The builders were on the roof anyway. So, as I have often wondered if some violent wind would one day rip the wobbly antenna down, taking the chimney with it, I asked them to do this simple job.
It crossed my mind that none of my TV signals came into the house through this array of grey metal any more, so what was the point of leaving it there?
Many of my neighbours in our Neville Chamberlain-era road have done the same. The houses all look far better without aerials and an amazing thing happens once they are down. Albanian scrap merchants appear, within half an hour, as if they have smelt the newly-downed apparatus from afar, begging to be allowed to take it away for nothing. Perhaps, like catalytic convertors, they contain some precious metal.
Anyway, they are gone, and it symbolises the end of an important part of my life and of the life of the nation. TV watching, once universal and communal, is fading away, supplanted by phone and laptop.
Peter Hitchens notes that from the moment he began watching TV, his imagination and concentration began to shrivel
I am a child of the age of TV. While my boarding schools took a stern view of the device, my parents quite quickly discovered that they could leave my brother and me sitting gaping in front of it, perhaps for hours while they got on with whatever it was they wanted to do.
In fact, my brother made it his domestic duty, after supper, to go and ‘warm up’ our small Murphy receiver with its bulbous works and tiny screen. Gullibly, I accepted this for ages – until I worked out that he was just using it as yet another of his excuses to get out of drying the dishes.
Shortly before I was born, the mighty poet and publisher T.S. Eliot, one of the few prominent British figures who was also at home in the USA, had warned of what this sort of thing would lead to. Nobody cared. In a letter to The Times on December 20, 1950, the revered author of The Waste Land and – it should be said – also of Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats, noted that the BBC was just about to spend millions on developing a TV service.
He had just returned from a visit to America where TV was already far more widely watched. He said: ‘I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this pastime and especially about its effects (mentally, morally and physically) upon small children.
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He urged research on these effects. And he anticipated the standard defence of childish TV watching – the wonderful nature programmes, the serialisations of classic books, etc.
He noted: ‘The fears expressed by my American friends were not such as could be allayed by the provision of only superior and harmless programmes. They were concerned with the television habit, whatever the programme might be.’
He predicts the BBC is ‘heading for the scrapheap’ amid the decline in TV watching and the rise in using phones and laptops to stream content
I think this is more or less right. From the moment I began watching, my imagination and my concentration began to shrivel. The long books in the school library, by authors such as G. A. Henty or Alexandre Dumas, which I had once read, came to seem far too long.
The effort was no longer necessary. I didn’t have to produce my own pictures in my own head. Someone else could do it for me. And so it all came drivelling past. Police dramas and thrillers: No Hiding Place, Dragnet, The Saint, obscure American crime dramas, bought by the crateload by British stations, with names such as Glencannon.
‘You can bet your bottom dollar…’, ran the theme song , ‘that Glencannon will be there’, though I cannot for the life of me remember why he would be there.
Plus plentiful western horse operas such as Gunsmoke, from which I recall only the much-repeated line: ‘Chester! This coffee tastes like hogwash!’
And, as the years went by, advertisements arrived, often more entertaining than the programmes. I still know that ‘1001 cleans a big, big carpet for less than half a crown’ and I will never forget the carpet commercials which ended with the proclamation ‘This is luxury you can afford – by Cyril Lord’.
Cyril Lord, whose government-backed factory in Northern Ireland was famous for turning out five yards of carpet a minute, later went catastrophically bust, just as spectacularly as he had lived and advertised. I was amazed to discover recently that Mackeson stout (incessantly promoted by that distinguished actor Bernard Miles, always playing homely but heroic heroes of the Second World War) and Maxwell House instant coffee, which seemed to be advertised every half hour in my childhood, are still available.
I once tracked down and drank a bottle of Mackeson, when I was old enough to do so, to check Miles’s repeated claim that it ‘Looks good, tastes good and, by golly, it does you good’. I have never had a second bottle.
Strangely, the cigarette commercials had no effect on me at all. Did I watch Steptoe And Son? I did. Not to mention all those worthy 1960s industrial dramas full of boardroom struggles, and heaven knows what else.
One unintended consequence of all this is that, as I hit my troublesome teens, I began to feel scorn for it all. I associated family TV watching with the cramped, stilted world I thought I was rejecting, and went off pretentiously to watch rude films in London art house cinemas instead, preferably ones which had been banned by my local council.
I do remember being rather excited in the mid-1960s as the huge hilltop transmitting mast at Beckley, just outside Oxford, was raised still higher so that it could transmit UHF signals and (perhaps one day) colour. But 625-line TV was not much more appealing than 405 lines had been.
As I went into my teens I could see the cardboard props and wooden scripts too clearly. Yet in the 1980s, I came back to TV, overpowered by the original series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I still rate highly – and easily amused by Minder and The Professionals (I can’t bear them now. I tried). I had to give up my anti-TV snobbery when it became embarrassing to ask friends if I could come round and watch the latest episode of Tinker Tailor.
Above all, I was enthralled by TV news, the two main bulletins at nine and ten, followed by BBC2’s Newsnight. I have never felt so in touch with the world, and the world itself was passing through an economic, moral and political convulsion from which it has still not recovered.
ITV’s News At Ten, with its magical pairing of the superbrain and cool beauty Anna Ford, and the raffish boozer Reginald Bosanquet, was unmissable. Would tonight be the night when it finally went disastrously wrong? Yet it never did.
When I began to spend long periods abroad in the late 1980s, I lost touch. By the time I came back in the 1990s, there was less to be in touch with and the new programmes seemed trite and full of canned laughter which I hate. Even the big programmes were small. The vast shared audiences of the 1960s were gone.
I realised on Monday night that it was the first time in many months, possibly years that I had watched a live current-affairs programme. I hardly ever watch the TV news, and groan when I do, that it reminds me of old Soviet Vremya bulletins from my Moscow days. By far the best TV dramas now come from Israel, France and the USA.
I still cough up the licence fee, but I really can’t see why I should, most of the time. We watched our neighbours’ daughter taking part in the Olympic hockey contest (alas, no medal) on our computer and had to pay.
I sense that the BBC is heading for the same scrapheap where those Albanians dumped the unusable bits of my aerial. What will happen to the valuable parts? I just don’t know.
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