Gogglebox, This is your life
Starved students of wise, witty writing about television have already gorged this year, on Clive James’s Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook, the slim but erudite appreciation of ‘box set TV’ by a polymath filling his twilight zone with The Wire, Game Of Thrones and, more perplexingly, The Following.
Now, we get a similarly fluent, sage-like commentary from David Thomson. Another veteran scribe usually found weaving prose about the movies, his Biographical Directory Of Film is now in its sixth edition since 1975.
After some 25 non-fiction books about cinema, this is his first on the small screen. Packed with Nielsen ratings, minor cast members, air dates and Emmy wins, it’s nonetheless written as if he’s working it out as he goes along.
A large-format, illustrated thesis-cum-history that’s hot enough off the press to include recent US sensation Mr Robot, the rise of Donald Trump and poetically, a nod to Clive James’s book, it charts the gogglebox’s evolution from a technological novelty that was ‘small, shabby… unlovely’ to its current critical mass, whereupon multiple screens have turned TV into what the author compares to an omnipresent intravenous drip that ‘seems to be life-supporting’. He has a transatlantic view. Born in London in 1941, he saw the televised Coronation in 1953, but moved to New Hampshire to teach when he was 30, where he consumed M*A*S*H, Maverick and Monday Night Football amid the postcountercultural economy that produced them. So he can nimbly skip back and forth between developments at ABC and at the BBC.
His account of British TV’s development describes arriviste ITV as ‘a vulgar intrusion’ into the ‘solemn excellence’ of the established Beeb, and observes that ‘the BBC promoted many things that have pleased American audiences’ – The Forsyte Saga, I, Claudius and Monty Python among these exports.
Thomson makes no distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. He explores the ‘demoralising and maddening impact’ of ads (in the States, they made him ‘jittery with interruptus’). During the 2015 Super Bowl, with its record live audience of 114 million, NBC sold ads for up to $4.5million for 30
‘During the Super Bowl, NBC sold ads for up to $4.5m for 30 seconds
seconds. (That four hours programming contained one hour of football ‘says a great deal about American culture’.) Linking chapters on news, comedy, ‘longform’ drama, role models, talking heads and cop shows display Thomson’s love of, and interest in, the medium, something shared by few of today’s TV critics, who seem to mark time and make quips until a more respectable post on the newspaper becomes available. Here, though, is an armchair companion creating poetry by thinking a little more deeply. He explains how critics saw The Cosby Show in its prime as ‘too sweet and overcalculating’ and as a programme that used to ‘smother anything controversial’; provocatively describes the terror attacks of 9/11 as ‘something done by people who understood television’; sees the satirical Beyond The Fringe quartet as a ‘corollaryofTheBeatles’;andidentifies Westerns as ‘dedicated to male self-sufficiency’.
Some may find Thomson’s scattershot approach infuriating and his interjections about watching Friends with his family solipsistic. I prefer to think of the experience as listening to a wise, verbose stranger enthusing at the bar, who explains the eureka moment he experienced while watching Breaking Bad without the ads: ‘All at once it revealed itself as less a show and more a long but perfectly judged movie. It was like water on parched ground.’ As is this book.