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Henry Jenkins had a rather poignant essay on his blog yesterday, from a media student talking about the significance of cinema to him as an Indian in Calcutta. The different ways in which people relate to technology are endlessly interesting. It made me think in about the parallels with my own experience of television as a child, and how it has shaped my current relationships and terrible tendency to complete obsessive fangirliness.
Anyone who hangs around with me on a regular basis will know that I have no filter circuits for a television being on in the room. If it's on, I'll watch it, be the conversation never so beguiling - I'll damned well watch golf or football in a pub if there's a screen in my field of vision, despite being more or less sports-phobic. This is, I think, because we never really had access to TV when I was a kid. Until I was 10 or so we lived on research stations in the middle of nowhere, and Zim in the 70s was not notable for good - or even existing - television reception out in the boondocks. There was never a TV in our house, so snatched glimpses at the house of friends or relatives always had an aura of novelty, the attraction of the strange. Those TVs are vivid in my memory: the faux wood melamine cabinets, the slightly grainy black-and-white picture, the aluminium antennae, the general retro solidity of the unit. Above all there was its unfamiliarity, something unknown, strange and desirable. TV has never been anything I can take for granted, a background part of the furniture. It's always a focus of attention.
Part of the attraction undoubtedly my partial knowledge: I don't think I'd have been as fascinated by TV as I was if there had been one in the house, since familiarity would have almost certainly dulled the aura of the glamorous - a fragment of bad sitcom out of context has, I think, a charm that full experience of the whole cannot hope to emulate. To a certain extent the appeal was also about the forbidden, since I think my parents didn't really approve of TV on a level quite apart from accessibility. I have to agree, there was an awful lot of junk on there. On the other hand, I cannot overstate the appeal of the frequently cheesy programmes we did end up watching during the delirious year when we lived in Harare while my dad was finishing up his thesis, when I was about ten years old.
We had classic stuff on TV in Zim in the 70s - things that South Africa possibly tended not to get because of economic sanctions? I remember Friday nights being babysat at my grandmother's while my mother was doing a course: we used to have supper on our laps while we watched The Muppet Show, and Six Million Dollar Man, and The Incredible Hulk, and the Tom Baker Doctor Who (Daleks in the Tardis! and Doctor Who's mad scarf and madder hair, and a wholly consuming angst on my part about how the hell the Daleks ever got up stairs). I seem to recollect my sister and I being particularly taken with Isis, the superhero who deflected bullets with her armbands and got cool swirly cloud effects when she pulled out her medallion and shouted "O Mighty Isis!". At home we watched things my parents enjoyed, like the BBC version of The Phoenix and the Carpet which my mother loved, or the entirely creepy and mind-blowing Sapphire and Steel, the sort of precursor inter-galactic X-Files/Doctor Who rip-off with Joanna Lumley, which I distinctly recall watching from behind the sofa or around the corner in the dining room because it was so frightening.
I was a fairly shy, geeky and introverted sort of kid, and didn't really ever have anyone I felt I could talk to about my fantastic taste in literature: while I was working my way through my grandfather's sf collection, he wasn't an articulate sort of person and I remember being a bit afraid of him. I certainly didn't have friends who read as much as I did, or the same kind of things. That grotty black-and-white TV was possibly the first inkling I had that I wasn't alone in the fantasy/sf mode, that out there were enough people who shared my interests to actually put them on TV - that thing that all the cool kids watched when I didn't. My irregular watching gave me a fragmentary glimpses into a whole imaginative kingdom whose sheer existence not only fed my overactive fancy, but validated my interests in a way nothing else had. The fact that we moved again after that year in Harare and didn't have a television at home for the rest of my childhood, only sharpens that sense of awe which attaches to that limited experience.
I would never for an instant regret my TV-lacking childhood, since it not only gave me my reading habit, it shaped my sense of television as mysterious and wonderful rather than mundane and everyday. Nonetheless, my current relationship with TV has something in common with Alice in her Wonderland adventures, doomed through most of the story to only glimpse the seductive beauty of the garden behind the tiny door. Now I'm (mostly) a grown-up with not only my own TV but the whole magic of DVD which allows me wholesale and unending access to the magic. Is it any wonder I end up rolling in the grass?
Anyone who hangs around with me on a regular basis will know that I have no filter circuits for a television being on in the room. If it's on, I'll watch it, be the conversation never so beguiling - I'll damned well watch golf or football in a pub if there's a screen in my field of vision, despite being more or less sports-phobic. This is, I think, because we never really had access to TV when I was a kid. Until I was 10 or so we lived on research stations in the middle of nowhere, and Zim in the 70s was not notable for good - or even existing - television reception out in the boondocks. There was never a TV in our house, so snatched glimpses at the house of friends or relatives always had an aura of novelty, the attraction of the strange. Those TVs are vivid in my memory: the faux wood melamine cabinets, the slightly grainy black-and-white picture, the aluminium antennae, the general retro solidity of the unit. Above all there was its unfamiliarity, something unknown, strange and desirable. TV has never been anything I can take for granted, a background part of the furniture. It's always a focus of attention.
Part of the attraction undoubtedly my partial knowledge: I don't think I'd have been as fascinated by TV as I was if there had been one in the house, since familiarity would have almost certainly dulled the aura of the glamorous - a fragment of bad sitcom out of context has, I think, a charm that full experience of the whole cannot hope to emulate. To a certain extent the appeal was also about the forbidden, since I think my parents didn't really approve of TV on a level quite apart from accessibility. I have to agree, there was an awful lot of junk on there. On the other hand, I cannot overstate the appeal of the frequently cheesy programmes we did end up watching during the delirious year when we lived in Harare while my dad was finishing up his thesis, when I was about ten years old.
We had classic stuff on TV in Zim in the 70s - things that South Africa possibly tended not to get because of economic sanctions? I remember Friday nights being babysat at my grandmother's while my mother was doing a course: we used to have supper on our laps while we watched The Muppet Show, and Six Million Dollar Man, and The Incredible Hulk, and the Tom Baker Doctor Who (Daleks in the Tardis! and Doctor Who's mad scarf and madder hair, and a wholly consuming angst on my part about how the hell the Daleks ever got up stairs). I seem to recollect my sister and I being particularly taken with Isis, the superhero who deflected bullets with her armbands and got cool swirly cloud effects when she pulled out her medallion and shouted "O Mighty Isis!". At home we watched things my parents enjoyed, like the BBC version of The Phoenix and the Carpet which my mother loved, or the entirely creepy and mind-blowing Sapphire and Steel, the sort of precursor inter-galactic X-Files/Doctor Who rip-off with Joanna Lumley, which I distinctly recall watching from behind the sofa or around the corner in the dining room because it was so frightening. I was a fairly shy, geeky and introverted sort of kid, and didn't really ever have anyone I felt I could talk to about my fantastic taste in literature: while I was working my way through my grandfather's sf collection, he wasn't an articulate sort of person and I remember being a bit afraid of him. I certainly didn't have friends who read as much as I did, or the same kind of things. That grotty black-and-white TV was possibly the first inkling I had that I wasn't alone in the fantasy/sf mode, that out there were enough people who shared my interests to actually put them on TV - that thing that all the cool kids watched when I didn't. My irregular watching gave me a fragmentary glimpses into a whole imaginative kingdom whose sheer existence not only fed my overactive fancy, but validated my interests in a way nothing else had. The fact that we moved again after that year in Harare and didn't have a television at home for the rest of my childhood, only sharpens that sense of awe which attaches to that limited experience.
I would never for an instant regret my TV-lacking childhood, since it not only gave me my reading habit, it shaped my sense of television as mysterious and wonderful rather than mundane and everyday. Nonetheless, my current relationship with TV has something in common with Alice in her Wonderland adventures, doomed through most of the story to only glimpse the seductive beauty of the garden behind the tiny door. Now I'm (mostly) a grown-up with not only my own TV but the whole magic of DVD which allows me wholesale and unending access to the magic. Is it any wonder I end up rolling in the grass?
