Television Rules
Those who do worry about such things can take comfort from the research findings showing that we are not, in fact, a nation of telly-addicted couch potatoes. At first glance, survey figures tend to give a rather misleading impression: television-watching appears to be by far the most popular domestic leisure pursuit, with 99 per cent of the population recorded as regular viewers. But when we note how the survey questions are phrased - 'which of these things have you done in the past month?' - the picture changes. After all, it would be hard, in the space of an entire month, not to switch on the news occasionally, at least. Ticking the 'yes' box for television does not necessarily mean that one has been glued to the set every night.
We do watch quite a lot of television - the national average is about three to three and a half hours a day - but television cannot be said to be killing the art of conversation. In the same survey, 97 per cent of respondents had also entertained or visited friends or relations in the past month. I am also always somewhat sceptical about television viewing figures, ever since I was involved in a research project in which a team of psychologists installed video cameras in ordinary people's sitting rooms to monitor how much television they watched and how they behaved while watching. I was only a lowly assistant researcher on this study; my job was to watch the videotapes with a stopwatch and time exactly how long our hapless subjects actually looked at the television screen, as well as making notes on anything else they might be doing, such as having sex or picking their noses. The subjects all filled in forms every day, saying what programmes they had seen and estimating how much of each programme they had actually watched.
The differences between their estimates and the reality, as clocked by my stopwatch, showed that when people tell a survey researcher that they spent an evening, or an hour, 'watching television', it is highly likely that they were doing no such thing. What they often mean is that they had the television on while they chatted with family or friends, played with the dog, read the newspaper, squabbled over the remote, gossiped on the telephone, cut their toenails, nagged their spouse, cooked and ate supper, fell asleep, did the ironing and hoovering, shouted at their children and so on, perhaps occasionally glancing at the television screen.
There are also, of course, people who grossly under-estimate the amount of television they watch, but they are usually lying, unlike our study participants who were at least trying to be accurate. The sort of people who claim that they 'never watch television' are usually trying to convince you that they are somehow morally and/or intellectually superior to the lumpen masses who have nothing better to do than 'goggle at hours of mindless rubbish' every night. You are most likely to find this attitude among middle-aged, middle-class males, suffering from the same class-insecurities as those who sneer at Mercedes drivers. This anti-telly posturing always strikes me as a particularly irrational affectation in England, where we have what is generally acknowledged to be the best television in the world, and there really is something worth watching almost every day, even for those with haughtily highbrow tastes.
For the rest of us ordinary mortals, television seems to promote the art of conversation, providing the socially challenged English with yet another much-needed 'prop'. In a recent survey, television programmes came out as the most common topic of conversation among friends and family, even more popular than moans about the cost of living. Television is second only to The Weather as a facilitator of sociable interaction among the English. It is something we all have in common. When in doubt, or when we have run out of weather-speak starters and fillers, we can always ask: 'Did you see...?' With only five terrestrial channels, the likelihood is that many of us will have watched at least some of the same recent programmes. And despite the relatively high quality of English television, we can nearly always find something to share a good moan about.
Soap Rules
Our social inhibitions and obsession with privacy are also reflected in the kind of television programmes we make and watch, particularly our soap operas. The most popular English television soap operas are highly unusual, utterly different from those of any other country. The plots, themes and storylines may be very similar - the usual mix of adultery, violence, death, incest, unwanted pregnancies, paternity disputes and other improbable incidents and accidents - but only in England does all this take place entirely among ordinary, plain-looking, working-class people, often middle-aged or old, doing menial or boring jobs, wearing cheap clothes, eating beans and chips, drinking in scruffy pubs and living in realistically small, pokey, unglamorous houses.
American soaps or 'daytime dramas' are aimed at the same lower-class audience as our EastEnders and Coronation Street46 (you can tell the market from the kind of products advertised in the breaks), but the characters and their settings and lifestyles are all middle class, glamorous, attractive, affluent and youthful. They are all lawyers and doctors and successful entrepreneurs, beautifully groomed and coiffed, leading their dysfunctional family lives in immaculate, expensive houses, and having secret meetings with their lovers in smart restaurants and luxurious hotels. Virtually all soaps throughout the rest of the world are based on this 'aspirational' American model. Only the English go in for gritty, kitchen-sink, working-class realism. Even the Australian soaps, which come closest, are glamorous by comparison with the grim and grubby English ones. Why is this? Why do millions of ordinary English people want to watch soaps about ordinary English people just like themselves, people who might easily be their next-door neighbours?
The answer, I think, lies partly in the empiricism and realism47 that are so deeply rooted in the English psyche, and our related qualities of down-to-earthness and matter-of-factness, our stubborn obsession with the real, concrete and factual, our distaste for artifice and pretension. If Pevsner were to write today on 'The Englishness of English Soap Opera', I think he would find the same eminently English 'preference for the observed fact and personal experience', 'close observation of what is around us' and 'truth and its everyday paraphernalia' in EastEnders and Coronation Street that he found in Hogarth, Constable and Reynolds.
But this is not sufficient explanation. The Swiss painter Fuseli may have been correct in his observation that our 'taste and feelings all go to realities' but the English are quite capable of appreciating much less realistic forms of art and drama; it is only in soap opera that we differ so markedly from the rest of the world, demanding a mirror held up to reflect our own ordinariness. My hunch is that this peculiar taste is somehow closely connected to our obsession with privacy, our tendency to keep ourselves to ourselves, to go home, shut the door and pull up the drawbridge. I have discussed this privacy-fixation in some detail in earlier chapters, and suggested that a corollary of it is our extreme nosiness, which is only partially satisfied by our incessant gossiping. There is a forbidden-fruit effect operating here: the English privacy rules mean that we tend to know very little about the personal lives and doings of people outside our immediate circle of close friends and family. It is not done to 'wash one's dirty linen in public', nor is it acceptable to ask the kind of personal questions that would elicit any such washing.