The Box

The evolution of the television has happened almost entirely in this lifetime. Not completely in my lifetime but people only a little older than me will tell you they grew up without one. My parents used to tell stories about the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Hardly anyone had a TV until then and whole streets crowded into one person’s front room to watch it.

The telly became important during my childhood. We rented ours from Rediffusion. It was a huge box that took up the whole corner of the room. At first, we couldn’t afford to rent a colour set and watching snooker in black and white was one of my favourite challenges (I wouldn’t watch snooker now because what’s the point if you can see all the colours?). The Rediffusion shop was the place to go if you wanted to see a programme in colour. You could press your nose against the shop window, which contained a bank of boxes showing all three channels. My friend Tim had a colour set and sometimes I would go round and watch Blue Peter just to find out what colour sticky back plastic Lesley Judd had used to make her pencil pots.

There were traditions around the TV that involved the whole family. One of my earliest memories is watching Magic Roundabout with my parents. When it finished it was time for me to go to bed (or maybe have a bath - the phrase, “bath, bottle and bed,” has just popped into my head) and the News at Six would start. The theme song made Tess, our dog, go crazy. She would run in circles; spinning and falling over things; running between my dad and the door. The Six O’Clock News was walk time.
Sunday afternoons were spent in front of a black and white film with a bar of Dairy Milk while the parents slept off the Sunday lunch wine. You knew what day it was by what was on. Monday night: Cold meat and chips and Panorama. Thursday: Top of the Pops. Friday: Magical World of Disney.
Dad would come home from work and ask, “What’s on the box?”
Because we knew that he knew we would joke, “The flowerpot!”

By the time my children were born, programmes were on all the time. You could, if you wanted, use cartoons to babysit your children 24 hours a day. There were dedicated Children’s channels and programmes got better and better. TV screens got larger but their cases shrunk. You couldn’t balance a plant pot on the top any more. The quality of the sound and picture improved. Even Channel 5 stopped being fuzzy. You could watch TV at breakfast and a rat called Roland, with an Estuary accent joined you.

Before Coronavirus, TV was beginning to change. It was no longer a social event. Every person in the family watched their own personal screen. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Stories gave platforms for lay people to make their own programmes and they started to get good at it. Traditional TV struggled to compete but still made excellent high quality drama and showed programmes of people watching the telly.

It is difficult to make good quality drama if you have to be socially distanced. In fact it seems to be difficult to make any good quality TV. Suddenly, we realise how good the YouTubers are. At the weekend Dermot O’Dreary,  Claudia Fringeman and someone else that I hadn’t heard of hosted a concert. They broadcast from a studio that seemed to have been transported back in time, complete with wobbly walls. They showed depressing clips in between to make us feel sad about how awful the world is now. A death toll ran across the bottom of the screen (it probably didn’t but it might as well have done). Performers played from their bedrooms. These performances had heavy post editing but they still weren’t as good as many YouTube channels. On Thursday, they intend to do something similar with comedy.

I think they’ve missed a trick. We don’t want to watch the programmes they are showing. Last night, Holby City was cancelled and the choice was a programme about people giving birth, a home decorating show (when DIY stores are closed), Celebrity Bake Off (no eggs or flour in shops and too much talk of death and cancer) and a documentary about living in lockdown.
“Is it me, or has telly got shit?” I texted a friend.
“Worse than Christmas,” she replied.

What we need now, is a routine of nice things. We are depressed already. Watching Matt Hancock well up in the Daily Briefing is quite enough. There must be enough old content to give us something to look forward to.

This current crisis could be the final nail in the coffin of television if they don’t step up. The Thursday night depress you with comedy thing is already doomed to failure because we are all going outside to clap for a bit and then doing Jay’s Quiz on YouTube.