The new ways we watch TV now
Boxing clever The ways we now watch television together
It’s that time of year, the Big TV push, when every night there’s a thought provoking new drama, or Bake Off, or Strictly, or a Netflix documentary about a cult. Look, First Dates Hotel is back! Oooh, there’s the new thing by the Dr Foster bloke… To think we used to subsist on a diet of
Pride and Prejudice and Friends. Amazing really. But it’s not just the volume of unmissable TV that’s changed, it’s the way we now watch. Like needing bifocals, and raw onion not agreeing with you, we acquire midlife watching habits in our late forties (OK, fifties) and from there on everything changes. Midlife (ML) watching now means...
Turning off sex
Take Wanderlust. We really are meaning to watch it, but we already know the sex will get on our nerves. The sex in
Bodyguard, for example, started out Ok-ish and very quickly got annoying. The fact is, we get how sex goes, so, unless it’s screamingly funny or genuinely revealing (eg, turns out he has the lower half of a goat), we can’t put up with much. Also, because we are ML, we prefer the crackle of sexual electricity to bums squashed up against glass shower doors.
Switching on our interior decorators
We are, for example, watching Vanity Fair with our decorative antennae turned all the way up to 10. There’s a lot of sugary saturated colour in this production and, boy, we are noticing every inch of it, and the bedspread in Becky’s room, and the wallpaper. We were also doing a lot of wallpaper scrutinising during the Patrick
Melrose series, even at the most sinister and oppressive moments. (That is ML watching in a nutshell. We are so easily distracted, especially by a good grouping of irregular paintings on a wall.) Similarly, we can’t help wondering: “Would a GP have Philippe Starck furniture?” Sometimes this prevents us from following the plot to the letter.
Watching like parents
That is, more specifically, like parents of children old enough to be heading off into the world, so that suddenly fun activities (tombstoning, paragliding) become horrifying; Rick Stein guzzling street food seems irresponsible; and
First Dates makes us feel physically sick. (The girls are so dismissive. Give the gentle ginger bloke a break, for pity’s sake… who cares if he has a wig and always gets dumped? He is kind.)
Getting into easy watching
We might well cry during
Bake Off, having turned on minutes before, with no clue as to what is going on other than that someone has to leave the happy place. That is ML hormones.
FOMO watching
These days, we know the names to drop weeks before they air: Press. Killing Eve. Black Earth Rising. Little
Drummer Girl (the new Night Manager). ML means moving into a new competitive phase, where TV awareness is the number one test of your connectedness. You share hot new series the way you once shared fashion tips or mustread books. Whenever it was you were reading
Gone Girl and dreaming of tickets to Hamilton, forget that effortless time. Now it’s TV all the way – work that planner.
We already know the sex will get on our nerves