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Armchair nation
I've just finished a history of watching television
called Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in front of the TV,
although it probably won't be out till next autumn. I hope to be blogging some
of the stuff that didn't make it into the book over the next few months. One of
the more surprisingly enjoyable days I spent researching it was at theNational
Archives at Kew, looking at old Home Office
files on the politics and aesthetics of the new transmitters built in the 1940s
and 1950s at places like Holme Moss, Winter Hill, Caradon and Kirk O'Shotts.
These masts were seen at the time as modern-day cathedral spires, announcing
the arrival of the new god, television, into the region. I found this by one of
my favourite contemporary poets:
The transmitter stands lonely in my mind,
Remote and cold, beyond the aerials
Of gable-ends and guttering, beyond
Ideas of Eiffels casting silvery bolts;
Remote as the front that brought snowfall
to The
Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau;
apologies from high on distant Pennines,
though something of a signal still gets through.
Paul Farley, ‘Winter Hill’
Mundane
quote for the day: 'Last night I went to Elsa Lanchester's. Oh the
horror of TV! It is so utterly, utterly inferior,
yet just enough to keep you enslaved, entrapped, on the lower levels of
consciousness - for a whole lifetime, if necessary. It is a bondage like that
of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott.' - Christopher Isherwood's diary, 28 September
1959
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