Why I’d never buy a 100-inch TV
Mary Killen may view 50 hours of television every week, but she is horrified at the trend for giant TVS
Televisions have always been a status indicator. When they first became widely available (circa 1953, in time for the Queen’s Coronation), the bigger the screen, the higher your station in the social and financial pecking order. But as the years have marched on, the reverse has become true. Now, paradoxically, the larger the screen, the lower the income and social status of its owner.
As a nation, we have never watched more television. Ten years ago, we would complain: “There’s nothing on.” Now there’s too much on – enough to see us through to the end of our lives. Which is a good thing, considering how many of us may have to self-isolate in the near future.
But do we really want to be watching on the gigantic screens that are about to hit the market?
According to a new report from Deloitte, British living rooms will have to be totally redesigned before this decade is out, fireplaces and bookshelves discarded, to make way for 100-inch screens that Britons are expected to go in for eventually, so they can stream whatever content they want to their heart’s content.
Even the high-minded are watching on ever-larger screens. Those who used to boast that they never put the thing on can now be hooked by the latest Netflix box set; I doubt most people who watch episode one of Harlan Coben’s The Stranger could resist binge-watching the rest.
I spend a good 50 hours a week in front of the screen – some of it for professional purposes, as my husband Giles and I participate in the Channel 4 series Gogglebox – and would be prepared to upgrade our current television, a rather dated model with a modest 28-inch screen. But I would never want to go any bigger than, say, 42 inches; I would certainly never wish to be intruded on in my own home by a 100-inch monster.
I am well aware of the joys of being mesmerised by a screen big enough to blot out any other distractions, as we recently were when watching the restored version of Visconti’s 1963 epic drama, The Leopard. And it can be fun to follow a big historic event unfolding on a giant screen: we watched Meghan and Harry’s wedding on a whopper, but that’s because we were in a room that could seat 50 people.
It’s quite another thing to sit like a rabbit in headlights, totally dominated by a giant screen. I am sure that sales of 100-inch televisions will soar, despite the estimated £2,000-plus price tag, but it will not be a good thing.
Hailing from a medical background, I used to love watching Embarrassing Bodies (while hating Naked Attraction), but Giles was squeamish and wouldn’t watch with me. I’m not sure I could either, if the TV set took up most of the sitting room wall, given all those close-ups. Together, we watch Talking Pictures (channel 81 on Freeview), which shows vintage colour and black-andwhite films 24 hours a day; it’s also the preferred channel of journalists Paul Johnson and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.
An Amazon Fire stick (roughly £35) bunged into the back of the set grants access to Youtube and Dailymotion, where there is enough in the way of online educational matter to almost qualify a viewer for an Open University degree. I’ve been known to watch lectures by Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, Seamus Heaney speaking at The New Yorker Festival, a documentary on the life of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, John Richardson on Picasso…
I also love the entertainment on terrestrial telly as well: A Confession, The Gold Digger, The Secret and, our favourite short-haul watching, University Challenge. But you don’t need a mammoth screen with a cinema-quality soundbar to enjoy any of it.
Some years ago, I had to call on a neighbour in our village to ask if I could thaw some chicken thighs for our dog in her microwave. The thawing took about 20 minutes. My neighbour was watching The Jeremy Kyle Show, and it was like being assaulted: the noise, the colour, the ugliness of the audience… and, oh, the close-ups. People’s faces are bad enough in real life, let alone when five times their natural size and rendered in high-definition.
I don’t disapprove of people watching TV, so long as they engage their brains while doing so, but it’s another matter just to be sitting there staring blankly and letting it wash over them.
I fear there is insufficient distance between viewer and screen in a normally sized private house. A 100-inch screen will indeed be a status symbol – but it will symbolise the status of someone who has surrendered to the onslaught of images beamed into their home, rather than harnessed them for their own advantage.
People’s faces are bad enough let alone when five times their natural size