Slop [2]

My Grandfather remembered a world without radio. My parents grew up in a world where Uncle Mac and In Town Tonight reigned supreme. When I was ten years old, the natural order of things was to come home from school and watch Play School and Jackonory and Penelope Pitstop and John Craven and Blue Peter and the Magic Roundabout and the Six O’Clock News and Nationwide--but where “computers” were only found in Star Trek and Doctor Who. My parents were deeply suspicious of Television; and my Grandmother refused to have one in the house. Daddy admitted that when he was a little boy, he was told he wasted too much time at the cinema. I myself have an Iphone, an Ipad, a MacMini and a NeoLaptop (and wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to get through the day without them): but I am still inclined to worry that Young People Nowadays spend a bit too long on their Screens.

 

Daddy’s objection to television was that it dominated a room, where radio had stayed in the background. You listened to Tommy Handley firing jokes at you or Dick Barton escaping from Baron Scarheat’s nefarious trap: but you did so while doing your embroidery or playing draughts or assembling a scale model of a Spitfire. For all I know, this may have been true: in the olden days, radios were big cumbersome things that took a long while to tune and warm up. I have a half-memory of a time when The Radio in my parents’ house was a large, heavy, black object with shiny metal controls that was Switched On or Switched Off at particular times. The only voice I ever remember coming out of it was the one that said “Are you sitting comfortably?…. Then I’ll begin.” It was that long ago.  

Daddy also objected to the way TV controlled our life-style. He had a notion, I think, that “switching on the television set” ought to be one of a number of perfectly valid  answers to the question “What shall we do this evening?” to be chosen only after “play Monopoly” and “go for a walk in the park” had been considered and rejected; and that having made our decision, we should consume whatever wholesome fare Aunty Beeb happened to be showing. In the olden days people “went to the pictures” without necessarily knowing what movie was on. 

This was consistent with the endless complaints from Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her ilk, that Television was too rude, too violent or merely too interesting. If you were the kind of person who studied the Radio Times and decided to watch The Benny Hill Show, you could hardly complain that Benny Hill was purveying post-card humour (q.v) -- and if it bothered you, you were quite free to switch him off. But if most people were not making a positive decision to watch a particular show, but merely consuming that night’s bill of fare, then the BBC had an obligation never to show anything which could conceivably scare or embarrass or corrupt anyone.

This theory of Television created considerable friction between the older generation and those of us who regarded Blake’s 7, the Wombles, Rentaghost, Top of the Pops and Little House on the Prairie as unbreakable social commitments. 

I think when I was at school I would have been far more disadvantaged by not having seen Blue Peter or Doctor Who than by not having had a bath or new shoes or any breakfast. Which is worth keeping in mind when you talk about social media bans.

Granny regarded The Television as a very extravagant luxury, like a grand piano or a chauffeur driven car or a slice of avocado toast. How could some people be claiming Family Allowance and Old Age Pension and Unemployment Benefit when they were so fabulously wealthy that they could afford a Television Set? 

Grandad said that his first day at work, at the age of twelve, was as an office boy in an attorney’s firm, at a time where there were still rooms full of clerks copying out letters with fountain pens. I am not sure if I quite believe this. It would have been, what, 1912, when typewriters were already ubiquitous. Maybe old fashioned solicitors felt that it was good manners for legal letters to be hand-written? But certainly, Grandad lived through an era of enormous social change. He would have heard the first radio broadcasts, visited the first cinemas, seen or heard about the first TV shows, and lived long enough to take an interest in my Amstrad PC. His grandfather would have remembered the first electric lights, the first telephones and witnessed the rise of the railway system. 

Which generation’s lives were most changed by these new inventions? I think that the rise of the Mass Medium—television—represented a bigger change than anything I have experienced in my lifetime. Having a Computer in my pocket is very different from having a Television in my front room: but not as different as “not having any concept of TV” would have been from “taking TV for granted”. I think you would have to go right back to the exodus of ordinary people from the farms to the factories in the eighteenth century to find a comparable social upheaval. 

Will the arrival of Artificial Intelligence be like the invention of Steam Trains and Television? Or will it turn out to be a smaller thing, like when we noticed that Usenet is a bit passé and that all the cool kids are expressing themselves via the Twitter? 

*

CS Lewis said that he was once discussing patriotism with and nice old vicar. 

“But sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?” he asked. 

“Yes”  replied the clergyman “But in England it’s true”.

I do not have square eyes. The human race has not evolved into beings with gigantic bottoms and enormous thumbs, perfectly adapted to watch daytime soap-operas but not to do anything else. TV didn’t signal the end of cinema; cinema didn’t result in the closure of the theatres. Young people today read as many, or as few, good books as they ever did. Video entirely failed to kill the radio star. 

"But haven’t people always said that new technology will rot young people’s brains; destroy their morals; take away their capacity for conversation; remove their capacity for critical thinking; present them with violent and immoral role-models, and in general, create a society of mindless, screen-addicted automata."

“Yes. But this time, it’s true."