Chapter 2 - The Alien Discovers Life Through Television

The way dad used the television was manipulative, to the point where he tried to make it a virtue that he was transparently manipulative. We could watch what we wanted or turn the set off when dad was not around, but when he was around he chose which of the three channels we should all watch from an angle when his chair faced most directly towards the set. When choosing what we would watch he might have said that the broadcasters were being manipulative, because they provided so little of the entertainment that he was partial to. What felt most manipulative was how dad appeared to use the television set as if it was an obedient but noisy child, where the noisier it was the more obedient it was to him. He used it to make us, Mother included, quiet and obedient and child-like by comparison. With hindsight it was clear that a restful quiet in the parental house was the one thing dad could not cope with, and his control of everyone in the parental house through the television meant that he never had to cope with quiet.

His choice of viewing was always to find the most sporty or crass looking reporting of the news, the sitcom with the cheapest characters who shared the mouldiest jokes, the television programmes with the least information value. It was as if the lack of information in a programme meant that the programme could withstand being repeated more easily; we would remember real information that was worth paying attention to so it had to be updated. With cheap jokes and stereotypical characters that never needed updating they could be repeated to infinity.

Most evenings of the week and Saturday lunch time dad went out to the pub with his mates. He spent enough hours there mid-week every week for it to be the equivalent of a part time job. Add the weekend hours and they added up to a full time job. Around the time I was sixteen Mother went out on her own more too. I was left at home to mind my twelve year old sister many midweek nights. On our own we watched television or turned the set off to play board games. It felt liberating to not have the adults, well the parents, around insisting they were right and our choices were always the wrong ones. Our ideas differed from theirs. If we wanted to giggle at the names of elderly actresses like Googie Withers, who starred as the governor in the prison drama 'Within These Walls', then we could. It was as if their very names were jokes.

On my own, with my sister in bed, the programmes I liked were guided by Uncle Terry's choices when Mother and I visited him and Alice. I liked BBC 2 programmes like 'Call my Bluff' and the science documentary series 'Horizon'. I liked the way that there was rarely any continuous onscreen presenter with the programme. The programme would usually be a film about a particular branch of science, with explanation for what was happening coming from an off-screen narrator who spoke sparsely and let the visuals lead, with the occasional interview where it fitted in to the narrative. The presentation put the subject first and the makers of the programme far behind, well behind the scenery so to speak. I had often experienced teaching from teachers where they made who they were seem more important than what I was meant to be learning from them. As a television programme 'Horizon' was a good teacher, they let the subject lead. 

Another sign of a good television programme was that there was a book that I could read that would be a more detailed source that explained better what was being shown on the screen. Thus it would be that I read both 'I Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' by Robert Graves after the BBC television adaptation of both books, along with other books by Graves where with his pagan views he interpreted events that Christianity claimed to have the sole viable narrative of. It was brave stuff for a teenager to read. I would not like now to speculate the percentage of material in those book that went straight over my head back then, where simply stepping outside life in my own times, the late 1970's, through reading, seemed like a necessity to me as much as my reading seemed like a folly to the rest of my family.

For as long as I was on tiny amounts of pocket money per week I would either follow Mother because she requested me to be with her for an evening, or stay in and watch the television programmes on my own that I knew dad would never approve of, they were too intellectual. When I had to have money to make new friends and I had very little I was unintentionally following dad's example. The television was my friend, it was the better informed cousin or older brother I wanted when there was no human equivalent, when there never had been.  

I could not explain to either dad or myself why I loathed what he found to be compulsive television and he loathed what I loved. He was practically addicted to sport on television, whereas televised sport reminded me of the miserable time I had in school, with sport. I had done incredibly badly with school sports because it was competition without mentoring, or the stick without the carrot. I was half okay with the idea that my badness in sport made others seem better. But when the sports teachers wanted me to improve I could not see the point. Other reasons for disliking televised sport were that it was all recorded, rarely live. Because of that it was more television than sport. I was watching a recording of a competition which I disliked and within that I was viewing what was already deeply pre-digested that I had no part in it except to watch it glassy eyed with incomprehension. The exception to this rule, the shared meeting point for dad and me, was snooker, because it was presented live, as it happened and It was slow, quiet and calm.

Dad never explained anything, he left explaining to Mother, who he knew would leave out of her explanations anything he disliked. Among the subjects he avoided explanations for was why he disliked news and political analysis programmes, and so liked televised sport. Maybe he saw rhetorical aspects in televised sport; with it's immersive focus on the action of the sportsmen, televised sport was a way of avoiding logical arguments that knew of but had never thought through. The more televised sport he watched the more relieved he was that he felt less need to think. As a family we never allowed each other to discuss politics, religion, sex, or money. This rule was reinforced to the level where nobody in the family was even allowed to think far enough as to ask 'Who made the rules that banned these subjects so absolutely from discussion? And when did they make them? And how much further in the world did they apply?' What those rules meant to me was that we were not allowed to think, because thoughts and logical arguments required framing via the use of words-ban the words and you ban thinking altogether.  

If dad's choice of television programming was severely anti-thought, then under his orders the television reinforced the house rules when it was disallowed from presenting anything to do with politics, sex, religion or money. If dad did believe that could present stories that kept to self censorship rules of the house then both directly and indirectly, so much of what television presented did comment on those subjects-albeit with a fair amount of showbiz flummery to dilute any sense of direct instruction.

The level of showbiz insincerity was at it's peak with television wrestling, which I found both compulsive viewing and agonising in it's effect on me in the parental home. Television wrestling was the Gordian knot of all television presentations for me. Years before when I was ten, triggered by my being bullied and unable to fight back in school, I had endured a nervous breakdown and for seven months after I was put on heavy antidepressants which often left me feeling rather absent from myself. My family saw me as simply as being in some strange sort of limbo, rather than having had a nervous breakdown. They thought that only adults they did not know could have nervous breakdowns. I was put on pills to keep me calm and bring me round again. I did not know what I had gone through but I felt as if the pills froze me more.

Frozen in thought and deed as I was, Mother made sure I took the tablets, whilst why I had to take them was a subject on a par with money, sex, religion and politics in terms of being subjects fit for discussion. Also banned from all talk was what had led up to me taking these pills. But in this period of my mental fragility every Saturday afternoon around teatime dad would insist that the wrestling be on in the background whilst we ate. All through this period, and long after, I would sort of  'trip out'  on the television soundtrack coming from behind his head, every grunt groan and noise of a wrestler making a noisy and painful landing came to me from somewhere past dad's head. The characters of the winner, the 'plucky' loser, the cheat who did his cheating moves to the camera but away from the referee, all echoed the different school children who were part of why I had the breakdown. The roar of the crowd watching the wrestling echoed the noise of the classroom when the teacher was absent which was when the breakdown happened. At age sixteen, and having avoided it all the time I was in boarding school, those sounds and that drama came back to me from behind dad's head as if his head was a wrestling ring with wrestlers and a referee in it. His head was certainly a place of open conflict, particularly when he denied that it was drunk. This denial added to how I was personally divided by the television wrestling, where if dad had said in a way that invited confirmation, and actions to follow, that the wrestling was fixed and the way it was filmed made it even more artificial then I would have been saved a lot of conflict. But no, the conflict and denial had to continue. Add to that conflict how my now sixteen year old self was full of raging hormones, and the proto-homoerotic images of large men in tight trunks being tactile and aggressive with each other and what you have is me seeing well past the label 'light entertainment'. As I peered into the fake sincerity for signs of rules being well observed I saw only my frustrations dramatised, and yet again whatever argument I started out with ended up by looping in on itself. 

One of the better reasons that attracted me to what was shown on television was how unlike the parental house it was. Whatever we saw on it, every space was a single use space for showing us one thing at a time. Every activity was done in one space and that one space had one function that one time. With the house being so small and with Mother's hoarding making every room except my sister's and my parents' bedrooms multi-use almost simultaneously Mother made the parental house something like an inside out TARDIS; where the TARDIS was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, our house was smaller on the inside than the dimensions in space it took up suggested it should be. What Mother could never get rid of made it smaller, and through those things we still travelled back in time in the parental house. What Mother kept carried the stories we lived by, which by their nature stopped us having new stories to tell.

Nearly nothing of what surrounded me was mine, after all I had not lived there for three quarters of the past five years and I had even less before that. What I owned in my own right included some records, mostly singles, and quite a few cheap paperback books, most of which were juvenile in nature, particularly the 'Russ Tobin' series of books by Stanley Morgan. Tobin was a sexually immature adult male who lived in a world of infinite choice including sexual encounters that, literally, fell into his lap, from which there never any consequences. I perversely enjoyed the reductive exercise where the more juvenile and evasive the sexual detail in the books became when they described seemingly chance sexual relations, the better I thought I understood them. But I was young and secretly horny enough to believe anything, particularly when I was never likely to have an open conversation with anyone about what to do or like, sexually, and what might have been good or bad about it.

My dad read cowboy books, american magazines, and cheap detective thrillers with lots of near-but-not-quite sexual encounters in them which he got part exchange money back for when he returned them for new titles in what we would now call 'a pop up book shop'. I drew from his example there: just as dad's cowboys and detectives were presented as lone agents going through hostile rural or urban landscapes, so it was for me with Russ Tobin; opportunism never had consequences, it could only lead to increased and unaccounted for opportunism. 

However silent and secretive I was about being a would-be erotic fantasist, to Mother I tried to be what she wanted me to be when I was with her. How could I do anything else? Mother was clear about money; everything about it was based on duty, not opportunity, much less opportunism. Thus it was that when we had to break the household rule about not talking about money I had to lead her in us doing so, because she would not take any lead in any discussion about choice with money.

Unexpectedly, I had been given money for going to college, a 'maintenance grant' of £1 a week for the year, a cheque for £40. It was the first cheque I had ever been given in my life and my inclination was to follow the agenda I previously lived by; I had never had much money in my own right so it was  best I give it away so as not to let it cause jealousy. I did not know what I had been given it for. I talked to Mother and I said that since she paid out so much money for me weekly then I wanted her to have the money, since I was kept I should learn to do without. I had seen how little she got by on and I saw easing her financial discomfort as a reasonable thing to do. She was vehement about not wanting it, she made it seem that I was tempting her to steal. It would have been helpful if she had picked up on the word 'maintenance' and said 'That money has been given to you so you can buy all the A4 pads, a calculator, pencils and pens etc that you will need throughout the year', but she did not. She suggested that I put it in my account in the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank, though I had no idea what sort of bad weather I might need to cover me against, or when it might happen. 

She then explained that from when I had returned 'for good' dad had increased the money he gave her by £1 per week and the budget and the food she served were not stretching very well. Half the £1 went to me in the form of pocket money anyway. I understood more then; dad was the one with the money and he was the one who should be increasing the household budget by £5 a week more, but he had not volunteered so far. What was more, he made it near-impossible to ask him about housekeeping money, even if part of what was being spoken of was about maths as much as it was about money. Since we were barred talk abut money, sex, politics or religion, little could be said. I thought that since we were not barred from talking about was maths then that was the way to ask dad directly for more money. He was numerate, unlike some men of his generation, though he strove to hide most signs of it. He knew that the more he hid what he knew the less we could expect of him in the way of understanding.

So it was one dinner time, in between eating mouthfuls of food, I explained to dad what he was doing in figures he could not ignore and I said to him directly that he needed to give Mother £5 more each week if the household budget was to remain in balance. In the harsh artificial light of the overhead circular fluorescent tube I could not tell what colour dad's face turned, but if ever a face looked like a storm cloud then that was what his face looked like at that moment. What I did not realise at the time was I had the advantage of surprise, he simply expected everyone to obey the rules of conversation without him ever giving any explanation of anything. He did give Mother more for the housekeeping, probably half of what he should have given her, but still more than the £1 a week he had given whilst he silently knew, and denied to himself and others, that it was not enough.

That said, I soon understood that the power of surprise can only be used once. With dad I was in the situation of being unable to pick my battles, he always had the advantage of setting my battles with him on his terms because he owned the parental house. In the longer term it was thinking like this that personally turned me off property ownership. I did not want to be that secretive and distant. When force and secrecy are the nearest there is to morality, and they hide behind a distant politeness, then that politeness creates a deferrence in others that becomes equally distancing. This was something I had dimly perceived from the life and routines I observed in the care home/boarding school, where even now I would find the handful of boys around the town who had attended that school where when we met we would puzzle over life now and life in the past that put us in that place. None of us had the forethought and courage to ask Social services directly why we were sent there, and to see what files they had kept on us.

The easiest cover for the necessity of secrecy was shared television watching. Much of what was considered 'family viewing' was the audio/visual equivalent of a reading age of around ten at best, which matched the newspapers we read every day. The more limited in intelligence the programmes were, the more their virtue and purpose became that we could form a consensus of opinion around them as a family. Secrecy meant that forming a consensus around how we saw each other was far less likely or possible; too much would have to be revealed. The more intelligent and argumentative the programme became the narrower the consensus that we could form around the points it raised. The best programmes for forming cheap agreement around were the beauty pageants like 'Miss World', where the programme makers made the sexism they exemplified seem inoffensive beyond belief, and it made the beauty industry, the selling of make up etc an instrument of world peace even with the beauty treatments pandering to white majoritism and being tested on animals. But we valued agreement much more often than we rejected a programme for dumb us down. Television unified us in a passive consensus which seemed to be a good thing in a world where we were afraid of disagreeing with each other. None of us had learned at that time how to cope with us all being complex and individuals. When differences separated us from each other we had to hide our differences, however awkward such open opacity became.

As the household alien I felt that I was at my best when I watched Dr Who. For the first time I watched a whole season of episodes. I followed the arc of the story however, absurd it seemed, avidly. I felt dad's distant approval from across the room when I sensed that he knew that my watching the programme made me obviously happy. He let me watch it even though we all knew that his choice would have been some glossy high-budget low-on-continuity american drama where the point of the drama was the size of the cars and men were real men because they all carried guns about with them. The gun made the man. Dr Who was a different universe to all that, literally.

Please find Chapter 3 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.