Small-screen stories

As I mentioned in my earlier posting (Screen pleasures), I did not have TV when I was growing up, as my parents found it second-rate and a waste of time, compared to films. That didn’t stop us children from being quite ‘au fait’ with a lot of TV programmes, mostly because we’d see them at friends’ houses–just enough to pick up on main themes and characters and so on, enough certainly to bluff everyone into thinking we did have a TV! (Not having a TV in your house seemed as incomprehensible to most people as say living in a cave would. ) That was how we got to see things like Dr Who (a favourite), Bonanza, Gilligan’s Island, Happy Days and so on. When we visited our grandparents in France, we also got to watch TV–they thought my parents were indeed troglodytes for not having one!

I remember an amazing time when my dad’s father (the same one who’d been in films before the war) turned up at our house in the south of France with a TV he’d bought ‘for the children, so they don’t have to be different to everyone else!’ Dad simply picked it up and heaved it out of the first-floor window (he and his father had what might politely be called a fiery relationship); it hit the ground and exploded in a shower of sparks! Shouts and curses all round; but the house stayed resolutely TV-less.
I didn’t really mind life without a TV as a kid. It was fun watching it when I could–but we did plenty of other things, reading, travelling, listening to music, going to films, making up dreadful plays with my siblings which we’d then force my parents to watch–I was never bored. (Some of my siblings say they were, though!)
For a few years after I left home, I lived in a house with a TV. This was the late seventies and early eighties, and there were some cracker BBC shows around–Minder, Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, The Secret Army(a wonderful series set in a French Resistance group–‘Allo, ‘Allo was a parody of it); Dad’s Army were some of my favourites. (Did you know by the way that our great poet Les Murray cites ‘Minder’ as an influence, in terms of its use of language)? These are still wonderful–we’re watching them on DVD now, and they are still very fresh, zingy, inventive, funny and gripping. Other shows I quite enjoyed back then but which seem rather dated now are Are You Being Served? and Robin’s Nest, and The Good Life..
After my first marriage broke up, I left the TV behind again. David and I haven’t had a TV in the house since we’ve been together(20 years now!). He grew up in a family without a TV too–his parents were into self-sufficiency and radical politics and stuff on their smallholding in Worcestershire, and had the TV disappeared too. So he was used to being without it too. I had found anyway that apart from those high spots on TV,. there was indeed an awful lot of time-wasting tedious stuff, in fact the majority of it was. So we just forgot about TV, and our kids have grown up without it yet still very much au fait with it, because of seeing it at friends’ places etc. I also watch Tv when I’m away on tour and so on–have grown quite attached to shows such as Dalziel and Pascoe, Jonathan Creek, CSI, Midsomer Murders, The Royle Family, The Office, Frontline, The Simpsons, Without a Trace, Buffy, and so on. We also watch quite a lot of TV in terms of watching whole season episodes of favourite shows or tele-movies on DVD, mostly old ones but also recent ones. It’s so much nicer getting the whole story in one hit, and there’s no ads! Recent ones I’ve watched and enjoyed include Perfect Strangers (a gorgeous BBC family-reunion film), Shooting the Past(BBC, about changes in a funny little museum). I also love Blue Murder–the most accomplished Australian screen product of any time, as far as I’m concerned, a truly great piece of work; The Shiralee–the tele-movie with Bryan Brown; and My Brother Jack. A good case can be made, I think, that Australian TV products are actually better than films now–more focussed on story and character, they somehow work better, much less clunkily, than so-called ‘high-concept’ films which somehow miss the mark nearly every time.
I don’t miss all the other stuff on TV at all, except for at election time! TV comes into its own then, it seems to me. We’ve had many convivial election evenings with friends, sitting around the TV, commenting on the commentators as much as the pollies!
But not watching the news on TV gives you a different feel for what happens than when you see those images. We actually heard about the attacks on New York and Washington on the radio—we heard about it on radio on the morning of September 12. It had a huge impact on us; threw us off our moorings, like a declaration of war. We sat around the radio all day as normal programmes were suspended and all kinds of people were interviewed. Though we got on the internet at once too, we did not see the motion images of the planes hitting the towers until nearly two days later, when everyone else had seen those images many, many times over on TV.
TV can dilute the impact of all major happenings, it seems to me; those images repeated so many times over can simply fade away, become less important in the memory, or worse, become a kind of ‘iconised’ symbol. Because Tv’s so voracious too–you need stuff to fill in slots all the time–there’s little space for reflection. Or maybe that’s not true. I’m not sure. It’s just a thought. Anyone who wants to can have a go at debating it!