HE’S GOT A TV IN EVERY ROOM [109]



It has been nearly two years since I added a smart TV box to my television, and my viewing has never recovered. Unless I want to watch a programme right away, instead of catching up later, my TV will be switched from “DTV” to “HDMI-2,” so I can dive into the BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Netflix – “HDMI-1” is for my blu-ray player, having got there first. I am very suited to this arrangement, as I now have a larger screen to watch the video essays you often find on YouTube for films, music, computer games, dead shopping malls, and other subjects that may be too niche for “regular” TV.

Because I don’t often watch traditional TV programmes, my TV has turned into a multipurpose screen for whatever I can put onto it, including films and podcasts. The same can be said of my phone, as well as my tablet and desktop computers: they all are now types of computers, able to do most, if not all, the same as each other. It reminded me of a Venn diagram I copied out of a book over fifteen years ago, where Nicholas Negroponte, founder of, among other things, MIT’s Media Lab, the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and “Wired” magazine, had predicted that media, telecommunications, and consumer electronics, with few overlaps even by the 1990s, will have become a conglomeration of “edutainment” by about 2005 – Negroponte described this in the mid-1980s, even referencing the idea of “surrogate travel” using virtual reality.


Now we have our all-purpose screens, what I have realised is that, now that “television” is – was – a bit of a magpie medium to begin with. Films have been a big part of schedules since the very beginning, but that involved taking an established form out of its usual setting, a pitch-black, quiet room – and making it a background object in the corner of a room. Comedy programmes, panel games and discussion shows, especially when in front of a studio audience, have their origins in theatres and halls – drama used to be the same, but have become more filmic themselves. News is often nothing more than radio with pictures – indeed, BBC News reports are planned as a one-minute piece for Radio 5 Live or the World Service, before pictures are added further down the line. What was television offering all this time, other than making it more convenient to access moving pictures?

Decades ago, I would have asked the same question of cinema, radio and newspapers, as television has been described as the death knell for all of them, but I just don’t think that TV won if you can now access all of these through a screen. I don’t think the internet won either, because describing it as a medium, in the same way that the others are types of media, doesn’t really work either – everything is online because it is higher in quality and efficiency for getting content to you than by sending it over the air, or by printing it out. The restraints on different genres of content were also freed from TV more quickly than it took for TV to adopt them, but everything moves faster these days, and you can never say there is nothing to watch on TV anymore.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

JUST A DREAM AND THE WIND TO CARRY ME

Image
On 18 th January 1994, the ocean liner SS American Star ran aground at Playa De Garcey, a remote, rocky beach at Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. The ship, and the tug boat towing it, were caught in a hurricane, breaking the tow-lines, the crew on the ship later rescued by helicopter. It was hoped that the ship could be re-floated until, a48 hours later, the strong current broke the hull in half – six months later, the ship was declared a total loss. Becoming a popular spectacle for both sightseers and looters, the wreck of the American Star finally collapsed beneath the waves in 2013 – you can still see parts of it at low tide, but not on Google Maps. The golden age of transatlantic travel between Europe and America spanned fifty years to the early 1960s – with planes reducing commuter trips from days to hours, cruising became the market for the remaining ships, and for the passengers that did not worry about time. Now, Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is the only liner built to wit
Read more

MAKE A BIG NOISE PLAYING IN THE STREET [242]

Image
The Commodore 64 is generally agreed to have the best sound of any 8-bit computer released in the 1980s, and its Sound Interface Device (SID) chip is one of the most distinctive sound chips made for any computer. This is borne out through games like “Last Ninja 2,” “Bubble Bobble” and Elite’s “Commando,” and through the sampling of speech found in games like the “Ghostbusters” and “Impossible Mission”: “Another visitor. Stay a while... stay forever!”  The C64 is sought out as a music synthesiser in its own right, and the SID chip is default sound that an 8-bit computer makes – considering Commodore sold seventeen million of them before they went out of business in 1994, that isn’t much of a surprise. What makes that sound so distinctive, and the SID chip so versatile, tends not to be questioned as a result. In its simplest form, an analogue synthesiser, made by companies like Moog, Yamaha and Korg, creates a sound using a wave generated by an oscillator, which is then filtered
Read more

BLANKETY BLANK, BLANKETY BLANK [117]

Image
An iconic scene of British television exists almost entirely without explanation. The scene, replayed whenever the stars met, is of Kenny Everett bending and breaking Terry Wogan’s long wand of a microphone on the BBC game show “Blankety Blank.” What must have initially been an impulsive move, the result of Wogan’s pointing it in the wrong direction for a moment, became a procession of breakages, most notably with a pair of garden shears, as Wogan presented the opportunity each time they met. The phallic connotations of the pranks were definitely not lost on the audience, or on Wogan, who would present the rest of show with his microphone cruelly cut down or bent out of shape. Anyway, why did Terry Wogan have that microphone? It is a question I have never seen asked, let alone answered – it just seemed to be accepted. I think I know the answer, and it stretches back over fifty years. For the uninitiated, “Blankety Blank” is based on “The Match Game,” an American game sh
Read more