Real life

 Now that Cheesemas is over it’s time to do real life again. 

Haha.

Don’t be silly. What century were you born in? No one does real life anymore. Nope. The most real things are reels. You start and end the day with reels and send them to your partner while on the toilet, proving that you are in a real reel-ationship. 

I met Mary Whitehouse once. I was working on a questionnaire design project and she had commissioned her friend (my boss) to test some questions about TV. I don’t remember the questions now but I do remember thinking that she was wrong, old, fussy and out of date. She was standing in the downstairs room of our office, where my Boss’s secretary worked. Me and the other research assistant had come downstairs to see what all the fuss was about. The secretary, another 50 year old woman, was hanging on Mary’s every word, mouth slightly ajar, touching her similarly neat perm. I couldn’t take my eyes from her shoes, which were surprisingly neat courts, rather than the sturdy old-lady-bown-lace-ups I’d expected. Also, she didn’t smell of wee, as I’d assumed from watching her on the telly. She was fierce in a fluffy, conservative kind of way. She blamed TV for the decline in morals. She thought that if you put terrible things on a screen in people’s living rooms then they would come to think those things were normal and act them out.

As a book lover I didn’t agree. I read all sorts of things that I had no intention of trying. I’d just finished Oscar and Lucinda and had no intention of becoming a gambler, no matter how easy Oscar made it look. I had also just started reading Denis Potter's Blackeyes because it was one of those Sunday night dramas and it only slightly put me off wanting to be a writer.

As I was thinking about books she launched into a tirade about how the gogglebox was dumbing down intellect. People had no need to read anymore, she thought. My eyes rolled loudly and my colleague made hasty excuses about how much work we had to do. We had a sense that we had just visited an endangered species in the zoo. The woman was clearly mad and her ideas were outdated. She just didn't understand. A dying breed and good riddance to her.

Now that I’m a woman over fifty I realise that moral outrage is part of the territory. I hear women that were perfectly sensible in their youth suddenly declare that Mary Whitehouse was right. The country has gone to pot and nobody reads now. I only subscribe to the comfortable shoes and weak bladder aspects of my age  and I'm very careful not to let moral outrage about television or sexual orientation creep in. 

Screens are mostly good and Black Mirror is there to give us the hideous warnings. BookTok has normalised my reading rate. People read amazing books because they’ve become films (I can’t tell you the number of people who told me, “That book you recommended? Well, I saw the film and it was great and so I read it and you were right. It was beautiful." I try to remember that once stupid boy, shooting dead his classmates because he's played too much call of duty is not the millions of people who play it and don't want to kill anyone. 

Drama gives people with no imagination the chance to feel something.

Like Rishi Sunak, I watched the Post Office drama about the Horizon computer scandal and the destruction of the lives of several sub Postmasters. It wasn't a new story to me and I was surprised other people were acting as though they knew nothing about it. I wasn't going to watch because I thought I knew it all. I have an imagination and have been cross on their behalf for years. But I did watch and I was surprised at how brilliantly it was done. A drama can show things that the press (with all that truth telling they have to do) can't.  They can also cast the Post Office bosses as wasp-chewing ice queens and the postmasters as everyone's favourite actors.

The Prime Minister also watched and now they are back to work (honestly, please tell me again how teachers get too much holiday)  it is all they want to talk about. I'm glad that the postmasters are finally going to have proper reparation but the Mary Whitehouse part of my brain asks, 'Doesn't anyone read anymore?' If only there had been a clue that the government could have acted on sooner. If only there'd been articles in the Press, maybe Private Eye could have tirelessly campaigned for justice for them? Maybe the postmasters' MPs could have brought the issue up as a parliamentary question? Maybe there could have been a really high profile court case. If only there had been a select committee hearing where a senior MP could then woodenly play himself in the drama. 

It took a drama that everyone had time to watch over the Christmas break. I'm now hoping that the BBC drama department picks up the Ofsted Ruth Parry suicide story for next year's festive jollity, or maybe, like the postmasters, headteachers will have to wait for a few more lives to be ruined, a court case, a satirical publication to be on their side, MPs to ask questions and a select committee hearing before any change occurs. Meanwhile, I will continue to be furious on behalf of Ruth Parry and her family. I read the report on her death and everything Ofsted have said about it since (they are currently taking a two week break for mental health training) and I don't need a drama to realise that they have been treated appallingly. The coroner at the inquest agreed.

Mrs Smith continues to shine a light through her comedy.