Television – and me

The poet comes clean on his small-screen obsessions and why his new book tells his life story through the ‘The Twilight Zone’

ve rarely written very honestly, or at least with any allegiance to the facts. Facts in poetry mostly get in the way of the truth. Indeed poetry’s main attraction is that I get to make things up, and improve on the look of things, the outcomes of events. While my younger poetic colleagues all make a fetish of their authenticity, I’m about as naturally confessional as a housebrick.

But recently I decided that this couldn’t hold: too much was happening in my life that required actual honouring, not a word I can normally use without choking. It was then I remembered The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s classic series of paranoid tales that began at the height of the Cold War, and when McCarthy was a very recent memory. The formula is straightforward: someone is tending a bar, landing a plane, cleaning a glass – then a natural law is bent or broken, a huge lie is uncovered, or another dimension revealed. I realised that most of the important things that have happened to me – a death, a deception, a sudden change of circumstance – had the force of a paranormal event, in that they ripped a hole in the fabric of the known. So I ended up writing a book, Zonal, which read my own life through the lens of The Twilight Zone.

But Zonal is also really a book about television. It covers all my other obsessions and addictions – guitars, American billiards, video games, Solpadeine Max (the painkiller’s painkiller) – but it also ’fesses up to just how much TV I watch. It wasn’t always this way. After I left Scotland in the

accidentally go to see a melodrama, and are introduced to the world of adult emotion. It ends with two of the most beautiful lines written in the last 50 years: “I believe something fell asunder/ in even Will Hunter’s hands”.

At The Tunnel’s climactic moment, my arpeggios also fell asunder, swiftly followed by the rest of me, as the emotional relevance of what I was watching – to my own life and to those I loved – hit me like a truck. It did make me worry that TV has become the only way I can regularly feel anything very much, and pray I am not alone there. But it also reminded me what I’m still capable of feeling. I have no idea if any of this is art, but it’s a question that gets less important the older I get. I’m pretty sure TV’s dramatic extremes are helping to keep me more human; relying solely on other humans for that was never the best strategy.