Curated or not, home TV sets betray a lot

EVERY television studio is run by the technicians. The place is a mess of electronics with cameras, lights, cables, microphones proliferating apart from in one small focal area where the performer sits or stands. The technicians refer to the performer as the talent, but they do not think of him or her as talented. They think of him and her as a piece of meat on which they have to concentrate all their technology and all their skill in order to make it look and sound as good as possible.

To the technicians it doesn’t matter what the talent says or does. There will be other talent in the same seat within the hour. It matters only that the talent is nicely presented for the viewer’s consumption. For this is television — a visual medium for visual creatures. The image is everything. Words are merely background hum. Television is a place where every book is not so much judged by its cover, it is its cover.

These days with the virus, most studios are closed. But television has to go on, for what would the nation do without it? We’d have to take up embroidery these long cool evenings, or steam train renovation, or wood turning, or even, god forfend, talk to each other. So no, there must be telly. And there is.

For thanks to computers and the internet, every talent can now beam in from home. From their studies, their kitchens, their living rooms they smile into the laptop and disseminate themselves to us for our edification.

But they do so without benefit of technicians or any of the apparatus of television production, and the effects are evident. Gone is the hyperreality of the proper television image. In its place something closer to reality. And it starts with the talent’s face.

In the studio that face is buffed and powdered by a makeup artist and then lit with skill from every angle. Not so in homeland. So now we see the drinker’s nose in all its radiance, the cheek of ancient acne pits, the forehead gleaming like a metal bar and eyes all bagged and dark and hooded. We see, in short, the visage of an actual human being, with flaws that time and chance have battered into it.

And then there’s the backdrop. In the studio it’s a piece of flimsy, little wider than the talent, printed with some sort of image — a cityscape perhaps, or just a simple wall of colour.

At home there is no flimsy, so the talent seeks a backdrop in his house that will tell a pleasing story.

Some try the arty look. They place themselves before a wall on which a canvas has been hung, something contemporary and strange. Oh look at me, the canvas says, my owner’s cultured, rather rich but still a little naughty, don’t you know.

But most people do the obvious: they sit before a wall of books. Books are the oldest symbol of learning. To parade in front of them is to imply that you have absorbed them. The books are the visual representation of the talent’s giant throbbing mind.

Some favour the forbiddingly neat bookshelves, the wall of books that are arranged just so and look to have been bought by the yard. While others go for artful chaos, the temporary shelves with books laid on their sides and piled all anyhow, implying constant reference and active scholarship. But either way, the aim’s the same. It’s showing off. Vanity is almost universal.

But not quite. There still remain some naive souls who think that when invited to appear on television what matters is their expertise, the words they have to say. So they sit anywhere at all and speak to their computer screen, not thinking of what stands behind them. Poor innocent fools.

For in behind them lies the rubbish of a life we recognise, the random stuff that just accretes, the matchbox, the child’s tricycle, the flashlight on the mantelpiece beside the wilted flowers, the broken fly swat. Here’s all the stuff that fills your life and mine but never makes it into television land. To see it there is utterly compelling and we sit entranced by the physical details of a humdrum life. Bewitched by the ordinary, we do not hear a thing the wise old head is saying. The picture is what grips us, and the talent’s words are merely background hum. Which is, of course, what every telly technician always knew.