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It's junk, but it matters
I assumed that watching television doesn't matter very much
When the murder of Jill Dando was first announced on the radio, I was very sorry to hear of it, but slightly surprised at the importance it was given. As the day wore on I began to be mystified; the news of her death dominated the bulletins; the next day it overwhelmed all the newspapers with front page headlines, pages and pages of non-news about her life, and scores of photographs of her.
Almost at once famous people began expressing grief and shock, first among them some of the household names in television and journalism. At first I thought this was just another example of the artless vanity of the media, who seem to feel that the death of one of their own is unusually outrageous. But others clearly felt the same. Flowers appeared on the spot where she died. Soon the Prime Minister and the even the Queen felt moved to express their sadness. The police then said, with astonishing tactlessness, that they were going treat the murder investigation as if Jill Dando were one of their own. Considering the daily news from Yugoslavia, this impassioned emphasis on the murder of one media worker lacks a proper sense of proportion.
I began to realise that there must be some point in all this that I was missing. Assuming that all the enormous uproar about her death really does reflect the feelings of masses of people - and if the wily Prime Minister was quick to get in with his public grief, that is a reasonable assumption - my blind spot needs some explanation. I think the reason that I have no understanding of Jill Dando's place in the nation's hearts and minds, the reason that I had no idea that this ordinary woman is a major public icon, is that I rarely watch television. I had heard of Miss Dando but I had never seen her on the screen, and although I have seen photographs of her, she was to me one of large number of minor television celebrities about whom I knew absolutely nothing.
It is not simply that I haven't ever seen Crime Watch or any travel programmes or breakfast television. I watch almost nothing. I have never seen The Last of the Summer Wine or Only Fools and Horses or Ready, Steady, Cook. I almost never turn on Newsnight or even the news. All I watch are some children's programmes with my son, and ER and Friends with my teenage daughter, and a few things that people recommend. I am not proud of this. There's nothing clever about not watching television. It's not difficult or highbrow. I know that I miss a few good programmes. I like watching occasionally, even junk. I even worked in television for years, contributing to the junk. It's just that I don't have time, or rather I would prefer to spend the time that I do have on other things.
Until last week I assumed that not watching television doesn't matter very much. It's true that when people say things like Del Boy, I wonder what they mean, though not for long; I have always felt my cultural identity can survive without any knowledge of who or what is Del Boy. Indeed there are plenty of arguments in favour of not watching television; some of them are convincing, so convincing that I have banned television at home, temporarily, so that our son will be driven by telly deprivation to read more and to think more, poor boy. I sympathise with the philosopher Roger Scruton, who told Sunday Telegraph readers last week that he plans for his baby son a "genuinely deprived childhood", one deprived among other things of television. All the same, I am beginning to feel that switching off is far from simple.
In any one case it does not matter much, perhaps, to be ignorant of what other people know. One can get round not knowing who Del Boy is. Baby Sam Scruton will not be harmed by knowing nothing whatsoever of the Teletubbies. But television is not just a collection of individual programmes, or a collection of references, alongside all kinds of other references from music and literature and folklore. Television as a whole has become the predominant culture. Television has changed our sensibilities, or at least the sensibilities of the majority who watch it, and with it our culture.
Television is the medium of emotion. If you want information, fast, television is very inefficient. If you want serious analysis, television is always inferior to the written word: the pictures fight with factual information, and with critical thought; that used to infuriate me when I had to keep cutting information out of documentary scripts, down almost to nothing. Pictures, especially moving pictures, convey feeling. And if information about the world is primarily conveyed to most people in terms of low infor mation but high feeling, you get what we have; a culture driven more and more by sentiment, or by sentimentality, since the feeling aroused by the world on the screen is not an earned feeling, but merely the response of a cocoa-sipping voyeur. Television promotes undisciplined thoughts and exaggerated feelings.
That is an excellent reason for ignoring it. But the consequence of ignoring it is alienation from popular culture. It is tempting to think that as far as popular culture goes, out of touch is the only place to be. But it is not a comfortable place to be for long. It is painful to be unable to respond as most people respond; it is irresponsible not to know how they respond. And any one who wants power or influence, for better or worse, cannot afford not to know how they respond. And understanding how they respond means understanding television - and watching it.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 02, 1999
