Everyone’s telling you they don’t have a TV – which is true, if you were going to go down the legal route. If you were planning to take them to court, civil or otherwise, it’s true that these highbrow friends of yours, and all these people with fabulous houses that you’re looking at online with varying narrow-eyed moments of lust and envy, don’t have a television.
They’re telling you this, of course, to broadcast their intelligence; their intelligence and their gravitas and their impossibly precise, gorgeous taste. But listen, while they may not have a TV littering their living room, let me reassure you, these friends are still watching TV. They’re not quietly sitting in the candlelight with a book or discussing their relationships, they’re getting into bed as soon as the kids are asleep and they’re propping the laptop up on a pillow between them and watching some of the trashiest, silliest shit you’ve ever seen.
I just wanted to clear that up. And I know this because it is precisely what I do. I watch everything, from reality telly to art- house films intended to be projected 60-feet high on the sides of white mountains, on a dim 13-inch screen balanced on a duvet. I do this as a kind of compromise. Having meticulously curated my home, I came to resent the flat glare of a television and the way it dominated a room, so when the set needed upgrading, I put it away in the attic instead. The children were discombobulated and resentful but, on the whole, everything was fine for a while. We sat gaily on our low sofas with friends, we laid out small bowls of nuts, we chattered away as if clever, and we watched telly in bed.
Then, in a brief absence of company, I sat alone in the living room and found myself facing the space where the TV had been. A painting leaned on the shelf it once stood on, but the set’s ghost somehow lingered. I sat there for some time, focusing not on the picture but on the air in front of it.
It occurred to me that, without a telly to anchor the gaze of a room, our options felt uncomfortably limited. There’s no open fire, which would be the obvious choice. We don’t have the privilege of a conversation pit (the unfairness of which continues to bring moments of crushing despair) or the glory of a picture window framing rolling hills or similar. Could I fit a games table in there, perhaps? What if this became a library? Would a record player fill the gap? The question rose up every time I walked into the room, and indeed every time somebody else told me they don’t have a TV – what do you look at if you don’t look at a telly?
Like a baby or puppy or a flickering flame, one quiet benefit of a TV is that it provides something to sit around, a service I hadn’t appreciated until it was gone. Which is why, two months after resigning our telly to the attic, I dusted it off and returned it to the shelf – the room, having seemingly held its breath for weeks, seemed to exhale.
What's everyone reading?
When my imagination expands sufficiently to embrace a richer inner life, or my house expands enough to contain another little room that would fit a TV (a den! A home cinema! A special pod lined with duvets!), I will put it back in the attic. I plan to revisit the removal in the summer, when the demand for the warm glow of a flatscreen is less pressing.
For now, the cumbersome TV in our living room remains both comforting and existentially depressing, a reminder of the gap between need and want. But we’ll always have the laptop.
