So I’m not especially fussed that it’s 100 years since John Logie Baird demonstrated his “televisor” to a group of scientists gathered in an attic laboratory in London’s Soho — although I did enjoy hearing that the first recognisable image he transmitted was of a ventriloquist’s wooden dummy.
That seems an apt beginning from where I sit. Though I will concede that I, too, am essentially a creature who does whatever his master requires, in exchange for biscuits.
According to The Boss, TV arrived here around the time of the Melbourne Olympics, and pretty soon habits changed. He said people used to play cards and board games in the evening, read by the fire, listen to serials on the radio, or sing together beside a pianola. The television dispensed with most of that. Nobody sings beside a pianola any more. I am not entirely sure if this is a loss.
By 1985, he says, the essayist Neil Postman was writing that America was amusing itself to death. Postman argued that the conversion of serious discourse into entertainment was quietly hollowing out public life. The Boss thinks he was right — and that Postman, who died in 2003, got out just in time.
He wrote this before streaming, before the algorithm decided what you wanted to watch before you did, before the remote control occupied one hand and a smartphone occupied the other — neither being available for an ear scratch.
What Postman couldn’t have predicted was that, 100 years on from Baird’s flickering image of the ventriloquist’s dummy, we would see households where family or friends sit in the same room watching entirely different things on entirely different screens — each connected to the world, and softly disconnected from each other.
The Boss has valiantly resisted it. He doesn’t watch much of it but concedes that, when television does its best, it can be breathtaking. An example is that unmistakable voice coming out of the screen like a well-worn leather armchair — lilting, reliable, full of quiet authority.
The voice of a man who has spent his life watching extraordinary things happen and somehow resisted the urge to shout about it. It’s the voice of Sir David Attenborough.
Like television, he is 100 years old. Between them, they have crafted something that no library, no classroom, no lecturer ever quite managed: they have brought the wonders of the natural world to people who could never afford the ticket.
Most people aren’t going to ever find themselves trekking through the Amazon or watching a blue whale breach in the freezing waters of the Antarctic.
Nor will they befriend the mountain gorillas in Rwanda as Sir David did, or witness a snow leopard prowling across the Tibetan plateau. He and television have shown children in remote arid lands, mountain villages and the slums of sprawling cities — children who have never seen an ocean — what lives beneath one.
He turned the television from a noisy intruder into a window for the curious soul. And if you are inclined to sit in front of that window rather than go outside and look at the actual world, well, I cannot help you. But I’ll be here, on the floor, tail wagging, when you’re ready. Woof!
