Soft focus on family life
ONE of the great things about photos is that they prove we’re not crazy. The pace of change these days is so fast that things drop from the landscape of daily life almost overnight. I can remember everyone having a telephone in their hallway, paying the milkman every Friday evening, standing up to sing the national anthem in the theatre. These weren’t particularly remarkable features of living in the Seventies but when I talk about them now, my son, born in 2008, looks at me as if I’m making them up.
SMILE! THE NATION’S FAMILY ALBUM (BBC4) seemed to preserve page after page of memories like this, not least because family life and cameras, photographs and the taking and storing of them, were all so interlinked in the last few decades of the 20th century. I’d forgotten myself that every newspaper and letterbox used to be stuffed with “freepost” envelopes for you to put your camera films in and send them off to be developed.
This was in the Eighties, boom time for camera ownership, cheap films, cheap holidays and endless shiny records of them. As this sprawling but rather lovely film demonstrated, the humble family shot had many purposes.
Parents used them to record the key stages of their children’s lives and to embarrass them later. People who’d emigrated here from far-off lands such as Jamaica and Pakistan used them to show relatives they were thriving and as a precious reminder of home.
As cameras got cheaper and Polaroid offered the magic of instant images, the power to take pictures was wrested out of the hands of dads and handed to the rest of the family.
Some families used them not just to record the celebrations but the sorrows, the slow decline of loved ones and the final moments. It seemed important to them that even if they only had a photograph, it was still something that you could touch. This was a tender and brilliant look at family photography, less photography, in fact, and more the ways in which people preserve precious memories of one another.
It also, for me at least, laid to rest a long debate about whether people took better photographs when they only had 24 exposures and a fee to pay. Definitely not.
The family albums were as full of blur and glare and bad crops and general pointlessness as all the digital junk we cart around on our smartphones today.
Whether made of megapixels, or printed on glossy paper, their meaning is for the people in them and the people holding them.
WALKS WITH MY DOG (More4) is the sort of programme that deserves to be called “slow TV” but can’t be because slow TV generally means something far, far sillier. This is slow, not in the “women knitting a quilt for six hours” sense but in the pulse-calming, TV-as-comfort-blanket sense.
Each week, three famous people go for a walk somewhere beautiful and interesting. There being no walk that cannot be improved by the presence of a dog, they each have their dogs with them.
Last night the unlikely trio of Kirsty Wark, Julian Clary and Bill Bailey ambled gently around the Isle of Arran, Exmoor and the South Downs, accompanied by their canine friends, pottering around sites of interest like people on a day off.
A bit of history, lots of glorious scenery and the sight that no soul can fail to be gladdened by: dogs getting dirty outdoors.