From time to time, if I’m not vigilant, somebody will ask me if I’ve watched the television. Working in the media, where everybody either wants to write for television or to be on the television, this is not a preposterous assumption. But I don’t own a television, so no: I have not seen Adolescence. Or Severance. Or Fargo. Or Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys.
You know who else doesn’t watch much television? Kemi Badenoch. Poor Kemi Badenoch. Last week she was the unhappy filling for two lumpy white-bread men in an LBC sandwich. First, as a guest on Nick Ferrari’s show, where the host pretended to be astonished when Badenoch said she hadn’t watched Adolescence, a Netflix drama that (I am told) concerns a teenage boy who stares at the internet too much and consequently decides to stab a teenage girl.
Badenoch, who increasingly has the put-upon air of someone who cannot believe how thick everybody around her is, confessed that she didn’t have “time” to watch Netflix. Ferrari then accused her of a “dereliction of duty”, as if Badenoch had refused to fire a torpedo at a Nazi U-boat off the west coast of Ireland in 1943.
A few hours later there was James O’Brien. I have not really engaged with O’Brien since the frenzied peak Brexit years, but he has maintained his capacity for the highest moral dudgeon. The idea that Badenoch had “swerved” the television was, for O’Brien, “unthinkable”.
He said Adolescence “scaled new heights of relevance and importance”; he likened the four-hour drama to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, an allusion that raised the similarly “unthinkable” prospect that the phone-in host, after a busy day of baiting loudmouth reactionaries on his show, returns home to snuggle up with a dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov. O’Brien, noting that the prime minister loved watching Netflix, excitedly suggested that it was “potentially huge” that Badenoch had not watched the telly like Sir Keir Starmer, and called her a “wombat”.
Without meaning to, O’Brien and Ferrari had reconstituted a classic scene from my childhood. Back then (in 2003) it was possible to be bullied at school if your family did not have access to Sky satellite television. If your household was Sky-less you could not watch new episodes of The Simpsons or Premier League football or Soccer AM. (Maybe teenage boys today roast each other for not watching Adolescence, although I doubt it.) This mark of Cain was branded on some of my classmates, whose pathetic reliance on mere five-channel terrestrial television condemned them, like Badenoch, as “wombats”.
I do not want to give you the wrong impression. My parents, children of the 1960s, watched television, had Sky and bought Radio Times. I followed EastEnders for years, and was alarmed to discover in later life that east London pubs are full of pretentious art students, not furious bald petty criminals shagging each other’s wives. I was not a “wombat”, though I became one eventually.
After university, I simply stopped watching. It would be very easy to dress up this cessation of habit as something moral and noble and healthy, like giving up smoking. It was not that conscious, though. I just drifted away.
Golden age of television? It passed me by. From my vantage point, The Sopranos is about an overweight and possibly Italian man who has lost his hair. Severance could be a show about kitchen knives. Mad Men may depict the lives of straightforwardly mad men. I don’t know and I don’t ask. “Have you seen White Lotus?” someone asked the other day. I don’t go around cross-sectioning people about whether they’ve read Buddenbrooks. My defence is the same as Badenoch’s. Time. It would take 56 hours to watch all of Boardwalk Empire. That is, frankly, top-heavy for entertainment. Bloated, not epic.
The (comprehensively ignored for decades) intellectual case against television, which begins with a letter from the poet TS Eliot to The Times in December 1950, is persuasive. Eliot, a transplanted American in Britain, had begun to hear from friends in the US that television was having an odd effect on children. Before the BBC invested more money in the technology, Eliot wondered whether it should investigate television’s “consequences for American society”.
Well, here we are in 2025, and Eliot’s children have become grown men seriously comparing a ripped-from-the-headlines telly snuff drama to War and Peace, while implying that there ought to be a political penalty for failing to watch television. As for “American society”, one consequence of television was to convince millions of Americans that Donald Trump is the thrusting hard-nosed billionaire tyrant of The Apprentice, not the perpetually indebted, hilariously camp vaudeville actor of reality.
Television, in other words, is propaganda. Even programmes that are, as Eliot put it in his letter, “superior and harmless”, are still propaganda. The less television you watch, the more apparent this becomes. After months or even years going by without watching television, its carefully marshalled light and noise can be overwhelming.
Bored in a New York hotel room recently, I channel-surfed through several Jesus-themed shopping shows until I came across Chinese state media. It was weirdly green and entrancing, full of lush advertisements for environmentally friendly soybean oil and swooping shots of happy workers fixing solar panels to pagodas. Entrancing and, obviously, fake.
Of course, the fact that television is completely and utterly fake is the point, and everyone knows it. Who wants to be confronted with unmediated reality in nervous times like these? Television’s narratives offer reassurance and closure. Xi Jinping really is the Great Helmsman. These ritualised stories tie up the ragged contingencies of life into a safe, comprehensible whole.
Perhaps without realising it, in her response to the Adolescence questions, Badenoch stumbled on something profound. Audiences are shrinking. There are fewer licence-fee payers today than there were a decade ago. No show is essential. The big shows are not the unmissable cultural revelations they are presented to us as. Instead, they are more like starburst, burning brightly before rapidly fading in the void.