Grumpy Oldie Man
My silver lining to lockdown? I never had to go to any parties
If any publisher among you has a hitherto latent craving for bankruptcy, I have a proposal to hasten the journey to Carey Street.
It has no working title yet, but it concerns a Christmas stocking-filler – one almost certain to double up, handily, as kindling for the Yuletide fire – discussing the reasons to be thankful for the virus.
Obviously, given the carnage, this would be in sufficiently poor taste to risk the unusual feat of being remaindered before publication.
Nonetheless, as you will recall Tom Baker’s Doctor Who philosophising at the conclusion of Genesis of the Daleks, out of all evil there comes good.
With COVID-19, the unexpected benefits go beyond the usual suspects – cleaner air, louder birdsong etc – rounded up by the ‘Has anyone else noticed …?’ breed of Daily Mail columnist on unusually fallow days.
The top three will be announced, à la Eric Morley giving the Miss World results, in reverse order:
3) In Rishi Sunak, we have a senior Tory who can be mistaken for a normal human being. This could be a problem for insufferably smug lefties like me in three years, when the Conservatives remove the incumbent in Sunak’s favour to rob us of a God-fearing Labour government. But, for now, it’s hard not to relish the novelty.
2) The likelihood of Donald Trump’s re-election has virtually halved. If his charmingly idiosyncratic handling of the crisis does cost him a second term, those without access to Mr Baker’s TARDIS will be unable to view the alternative timeline had he won. But given the danger of an extinction level his access to the codes presents, the virus may prove the saviour of the species.
1) Having a perfect excuse not to go out of an evening with friends.
Apologies if that running order offends. There are those, the snowflakes, who would rank planetary survival above being cocooned at home with the telly.
Yet for as long Trump’s removal remains uncertain, the hard fact of being able to vegetate in peace each night must take precedence.
During a recent (daylight) meeting with a friend, I posed him a question I often wrestle with. In all your puff, have you ever had a nocturnal social engagement that, at 6.30pm, you wouldn’t have given one kidney, if not the brace, to have cancelled so you could stay in and watch television?
He thought long and hard. ‘I’ve a feeling there was something in 1983,’ he eventually mustered, ‘but for the life of me I can’t think what it was.’
When Kingsley Amis said, ‘Quite good telly is better than most people,’ he was too limited. Bad telly is better than most people, and good telly better than anything at all.
There was a time when a certain type of culturevore liked to brag about not having a set, or barely watching it if they did; a pretension Alan Bennett parodied as ‘Oh, we sometimes watch Mastermind, and we do rather enjoy Inspector Morse.’
If such folk still exist, they should – do forgive the momentary slippage of that complacent liberal mask – be interred in Khmer Rouge-styled re-education camps, where I May Destroy You will be played on a loop around the clock.
In the era of four channels, when a quarter of the populace watched Last of the Summer Wine without requiring preemptive tasering, they had some excuse.
During this 24-carat golden age of television, they have none. Not that the distant past was solely iron pyrites. Six of my untold thousands of viewing hours in recent months were passed reviewing the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with my parents.
As Eliza and Darcy stared at each other at some godforsaken ball, raising the conundrum of what the Georgian for ‘In the name of sanity, get a room’ may have been, my mother became alarmed. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Why on earth are you crying?’
‘I’m so heartbroken for everyone who lived before television,’ I whimpered. ‘All that going out for murderously stupid dancing or playing bezique. If they’d only waited a couple of centuries, they could have stayed home with reruns of Doc Martin…’
My father interjected, very much in the sardonic tone of Mr Bennet, that had telly been around in 1813 Jane Austen would never have written the novel. She’d have been too enthralled by Netflix to pick up her pen. In which event, there would be no BBC version.
He had a point. I toyed with responding by referring to the bootstrap theory of time travel – some notion about temporal paradox bringing about the impossible I sometimes pretend to understand – which would somehow put that right.
But as Mary Bennet took to the piano, I felt that this debate had delighted us long enough.
The same will never be said of telly in most of its myriad forms. The only programmes I avoid these days involve news and current affairs. Whenever the lockdown ends (if it hasn’t already), I wish to know nothing about it.