Armchair Nation Read Free Page B

kind of armchair nation – not perhaps the united, countrywide family that primetime television assumes it is addressing, but a more improvised community of viewers, formed wordlessly and unconsciously through collective habits and behaviours. Aerials and satellite dishes spring up silently on roofs, living-room curtains close, streets and roads empty of people and cars, the tills in public houses are stilled and the boiling of kettles synchronises across the nation – all because people are watching television. Precisely because it is so fragile and intangible and demands so little of those who belong to it, the armchair nation can create a sense of commonality among people who may have little else in common. And perhaps this collective habit of watching TV, which has taken up so much of our waking lives, can tell us something about who we are and what matters to us.

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A WAKING DREAM
    There are words which are ugly because of foreignness or ill-breeding (e.g. television)
.
    T. S. Eliot 1
    â€˜Oxford Street … is a forcing house of sensation,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay for
Good Housekeeping
magazine in 1928. ‘The great Lords of Oxford Street are as magnanimous as any Duke or Earl who scattered gold or doled out loaves to the poor at his gates. Only their largesse takes a different form. It takes the form of excitement, of display, of entertainment, of windows lit up by night, of banners flaunting by day.’ 2 Woolf often shopped at Selfridge’s, at the street’s western end. From the moment you entered on the ground floor, with its heady perfume counter designed to disguise the bouquet of horse manure and other noxious gases from the street outside, Selfridge’s was meant to be a profusion of scents, sights and sounds. It displayed Louis Blériot’s plane on its lower ground floor the day after his cross-channel flight in July 1909, and Ernest Shackleton’s twenty-two-foot boat, the
James Caird
, on its roof in February 1920.
    The American owner, Harry Selfridge, was looking for another attraction to celebrate the opening of his western extension and the store’s sixteenth birthday. On a tip-off, he visited John Logie Baird’s Soho workshop and asked him to come and demonstrate his new invention. And so, one Wednesday morning in March 1925, in theelectrical department on the first floor, this diffident-looking man in wire-rimmed glasses set up an odd contraption in one corner, assembled from such items as old cycle lamps, coffin wood and a biscuit tin (Rich Mixed), at the end of which was a rapidly spinning disc and a ‘danger’ sign. ‘The House of Selfridge has always gone out of its way to encourage other pilgrims on the Road of Progress,’ announced Callisthenes, Selfridge’s column in
The Times
. ‘And this picturesque apparatus with its cardboard and its bicycle chain is in direct succession to Blériot’s gallant monoplane and Shackleton’s brave boat.’ 3
    Television was a dream long before it was a fact. This Greco-Latin word, coined in French and borrowed by the English language in 1907, means ‘far sight’. Television was meant to defeat distance, to show events happening at the same time somewhere else. For centuries people had fantasised about the instantaneous journey of sound and vision across space. For St Augustine, the epitome of this incorporeal, telepathic communication was the angel, a word that means ‘messenger’. The holiest mortals were also thought to have this power. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order of Poor Clares, was supposed, from her convent sickbed in Christmas 1252, to have watched midnight mass in the Basilica of St Francis a few miles away, projected on to the wall of her room. In 1958, Pope Pius XII declared this miracle to be the first television broadcast and named Clare the patron saint of television.
    In a world that takes instant communication as