Greater and greater things

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rilke

Drug of a nation

He once worked out that, until he grew up, grew a mind and left his parents’ house, he had watched more than a million hours of television.

Television had been a large part his life since he was an infant, since he first began taking notice of the outside world. As a child he naturally preferred the multicoloured hysteria of cartoons and children’s shows, sitting on the floor with his fingers in his mouth, his spellbound face lit up by whatever image cavorted on the screen. But as he got older he watched whatever was on when he turned on the set, from Doomwatch to darts, from ballroom dancing to Melvyn Bragg, from Blind Date to When Animals Attack. He was blessed with an uncritical, unimpressed mind. He watched it all: documentaries on cancer and rutting animals; costume dramas and chat shows; hip-hop videos and political philosophers; and adverts - millions of adverts. For razors, batteries, washing machines, cars, lipstick, insurance, charities, laser hair removal, microwaves, televisions…

He was fascinated by television itself as much as by the programmes and adverts. He loved its antigeography of bizarre juxtapositions, gliding out to him through antenna terminals and wavebands, electron beams and phosphors.

TV had everything the outside world had and more, all conceivable sights and sounds, all of equal value: the experiences of a thousand lifetimes brought together in the screen’s perpetual day. It was always there, filling the void; a calming presence that gathered around itself, like so many dust motes, the aimless incidents of his daily life.

He craved it like a phantom limb when he was out of the house. Walking home in the evening, he shot envious glances at sprawling bodies in blue living rooms. His skin prickled with impatience to get back to his own room and slump into the same state. Then for him, too, the screen would miraculously compose parables of life out of a swarm of pixels, cocoon him in daydreams.

Friends was an American sitcom. Holidays were nature programmes. Drugs were scare-mongering news items. Much better to be numbed by the spell of TV itself.

The first few weeks after his parents decided to get digital satellite television were the most voluptuous days of his life. The technology was a marvel of scientific advancement. Up there was the mother dish, speeding through space in silent geosynchronous orbit, reflecting transmission signals directly into their dish, to be descrambled by the receiver and displayed on their 42-inch plasma screen with supernatural sound and resolution. Suddenly he had access to more than a hundred channels. It was as if the whole universe had opened up and were welcoming him with open arms.

But after a while he began to feel dissatisfied. He started to feel the burden of choice, of what to watch. Watching one programme meant missing others, hundreds of others. There was always something better on. He became a zapper: he couldn’t watch any programme to its conclusion. He could no longer be anywhere there was a television without wanting to change the channel. Whereas before he had been the detached observer, lazily fingering the remote, letting himself be entertained, now it was as if the screen were making claims on him, attacking him with its endless parade of attention-grabbing images. When he learned how to use the system’s interactive functions and inbuilt video recorder, the possibilities of selecting, encoding and storing images overwhelmed him. He was assailed by a barrage of information he couldn’t control.

He watched so much TV that he crossed some kind of boundary: it was if the roles of watcher and watched were being insidiously reversed, as if a receptor were being installed in his head, transistorising his neurons.

It was only after he went cold turkey that he realised it was the screen’s eye that had been consuming him.

*

(The Father of Television, By John Dilworth)