I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of person who
usually watches television. Well, I used not to be, anyway. But things change
in life. That’s how you know you’re alive. And when things don’t change, that’s
how you know you’re dead. Actually, I’m not quite as sure of that as I used to
be. But then, there’s a lot of things I’m not as sure of as I used to be.
It all came from living in a bedsit. I don’t want
you to think I’m the kind of person who usually lives in a bedsit, but...
things change in life. When the Prince of Wales’s marriage broke up and the
Royal Watchers were saying how this brought him closer to the one third of
married people who had the same experience, somebody had the sense to point out
that he wasn’t going to have to move out of his nice posh house into a single
room with a gas ring on the hearth and the shared use of an unheated bathroom
and toilet down the corridor.
When it first happened, I used to say I was living
in an HMO, which is the official term for a building full of bedsits, House in
Multiple Occupation, but everybody thought that meant some kind of government
hostel, or a place they put people with a communicable disease, so I gave up
trying to be pretentious and called it what it was. Actually, can I rephrase
that? I tried to give up being pretentious. It’s an ongoing process.
Anyway, there I was, with no home to call my own
until the solicitors had finished arguing, my wife in full possession, which
may be only nine points of the law, but is ten points of possession if she’s
changed the locks, having to beg for a bag of underwear (which she dumped on
the doorstep, still soiled, so I was lucky it wasn’t collected by the Red Cross
for salvage), and trying to keep a low profile in case she just threw out my Beano
and Dandy annuals or erased my video collection (I have some quite rare
Kurosawas – which is NOT a brand of motorbike, as it happens).
I had to count myself lucky to have a telly. That’s
what everybody in the HMO called it. And they all had one. Go crazy without it,
they said. I felt I might go crazy with it. Lucky to have anything at all, they
said. And in fact I had everything, courtesy of Mrs Baird, who’d been the
previous tenant and had resigned her tenancy involuntarily on account of how
she’d died.
She had at least died happy. That was the general
verdict among the MOs (multiple occupants) as I called them. “The Gold Label
bottles I shifted out of that place, she must have been happy for years,” said
Harry. It wasn’t just the drink, I was told, it was also the telly. “John
Logie’s little gift” was what she’d called it.
“Never ’ad it off,” said Harry. “When I found her, she
was cold, but the telly was still ’ot.”
“Always watched the soaps,” said Jim, who, like Mrs
Baird, was Glaswegian (I’m giving you the subtitles for what he actually said).
“She could give you any amount of detail about them – I always said she should
go on one of them quiz shows – knew more about the characters than they did
themselves.”
“Mind you,” said Val (who was really rather pretty,
and had some taste in dress, and didn’t seem to belong in this centre for
neverdonewells and backmarkers who’d already been lapped three times in the rat
race), “mind you, it did make me wonder whether her mind wasn’t going a bit –
you know - ”
“Towards the end, you mean?” asked Jim
“No – all the time, actually. I mean, she didn’t
seem to grasp what was going on – you know, when someone took an overdose, or
was diagnosed HIV-positive, or got run down by a bus, so they could go off and
have their own drama series – she just didn’t seem to notice – or she’d explain
it some other way.”
“Probably the aluminium saucepans,” said Harry.
Since they were the same saucepans I was using, I
made a mental note to get more takeaways for the sake of my health. I’d
inherited everything – except for the bank-books which her son had taken and
the clothes which had gone to Oxfam. Using things which had belonged to a dead
person worried me at first – until I reflected how much was paid at auctions
for things that had belonged to dead people, and the more dead people they’d
belonged to, the better.
The idea of watching the soaps didn’t appeal to me
much, I must confess. I’ve always been an intellectual snob – it’s what got me
where I am today – teaching English in a sixth form college, I mean – and I
used to call the people who watched soaps “bubbleheads”. But when there’s
nothing else to do of an evening, and you haven’t got the money to go down the
pub, and you daren’t really anyway, because of the people you might meet, and
there are no shelves to put up or kids to play with, the telly’s big blank eye
looks at you reproachfully, like a stuffed animal saying, “I was alive once.” A
bit of colour, a bit of flickering motion in the corner of the room. And if you
don’t watch the soaps, then you haven’t got anything to talk about during those
little encounters in the corridor that are the bright spots of your existence.
Besides which, they’re about people. And if you’ve
just been cut off from all the human beings who used to inhabit your world,
it’s quite consoling. Moreover, chocolate brings me out in spots and doesn’t do
my digestion any good.
Mark you, I didn’t start on the soaps. It was films
first. Good, old-fashioned, black and white films. If the film’s black and
white, then that’s what the issues are, too. Made me feel young again, as well
– not, I hasten to point out, that I actually saw Casablanca and The
Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and Now, Voyager and Wuthering
Heights and The First of the Few in the cinema. I was a kid when the
television companies bought up the rights to the first tranche of “Hollywood
Greats”, as they called them, and they enlivened those Sunday afternoons after
lunch when it seemed that I was the only person in the world still awake. Some
of them I saw again at university film clubs – before the great Video
Revolution, back in the days when people all round the country spent Monday
mornings packing up several reels of Ivan the Terrible to send it off to
the next venue that had booked it.
I caught Wuthering Heights one early
afternoon. It was on the secondary reading list, so I’d not opened it for
years, but I certainly hadn’t expected Kathy and Heathcliff to end up happily
married. That wasn’t the sense of things you got from the Kate Bush song,
anyway. Or the Monty Python version in semaphore. “Hollywood!” I snorted to
myself, and ringed round Casablanca in two days’ time.
Paul Heinried got shot on the tarmac and bequeathed
Ingrid Bergman to Humphrey Bogart and the pair of them flew off in the plane,
kissing madly. I think Claude Rains claimed that Colonel Strasser’s death was
suicide, but I was a little distracted by then.
I can tell you, though, that Paul Heinried broke
even in Now, Voyager because he got to marry a completely cured Bette
Davis. I tried to check my memories against the Time Out Big Book of
Films (which I’d smuggled out under my raincoat when I called in to give my
younger daughter a birthday card) – but it didn’t go in for plot summaries,
only smart-arse critical comments in out-dated hip vocabulary. Almost
reconciled me to my students, whose essays never got beyond plot summaries,
though the line “Macbeth kills Duncan with a non-existent dagger to avoid
fingerprints” reveals the limitations of even that approach.
When it came to the soaps, I had some sort of
objective check on what was happening. I’d run into Val on the stairs and she’d
say, “Did you see so-and-so last night?” and I’d nod in that ambiguous way I’d
developed through so many meetings of the Curriculum Committee, and she’d carry
on, “Wasn’t it awful about thingummy?” and within seconds I’d hear about child
abuse and emotional frigidity and callousness and drink problems and stifling
East End family loyalty, or Northern solidarity against the intrusive outsider,
or what was really under the patio... and I’d keep quiet about the fact that on
my set the paving slabs concealed nothing except half a hundredweight of
sharp sand and a bag or two of pea-shingle: the drunken husband was in a clinic
at Newton-le-Willows, and had been for several episodes, with no prospect of
returning. If I hadn’t been fairly strong-minded (and, as someone with a career
in education, had a lifetime’s experience of doublethink) I might have
collapsed under the strain of this split existence.
Mrs Baird must have been pretty strong-minded, too,
come to think of it. She obviously liked a happy ending, and knew how to get
it. Year after year she took this world entire, and then remade it nearer to
her heart’s desire. Maybe if you reduced the world to a single room, and then
concentrated on a box about one third the size of a coffin, that was what you
could do. A sort of bonsai garden of the soul. When people talked about ghosts in terms of television,
I’d thought they meant those shadowy second images produced when the signal
bounced off inconvenient hills or high-rise blocks.
I can’t deny that it had an effect on me. “The power
of positive thought” I believe they call it. I wondered if problems weren’t,
perhaps, after all, soluble. I even rang up my wife and tried to sort things
out with her.
In retrospect, I should have got Mrs Baird to try
and do the job – though even she would probably have been defeated. The
conversation began as a shouting match and degenerated. I learned things about
myself that I’d never suspected. I also found out that my wife had discovered
her true sexuality and that the woman who had helped her to do so had already
moved in. On the positive side, that meant that all my possessions had been
moved out to the garage, to which I still had a working key, and from which I
was expected to collect them in the three days before the dustmen called.
You don’t want to know what I shouted back, or what
I shouted into the hallway after my wife had put the phone down on me. Mrs
Baird certainly wouldn’t have wanted to know. Val said she was just outraged
that anybody could have provoked a nice, sensitive man like me to say things
like that. Mind you, the language didn’t improve when I got back to my bedsit
and found it full of smoke, because the telly was on fire.
It was my own fault. I was teaching King Lear,
and I’d brought the video home to watch, knowing that the students wouldn’t
read the whole text, and needing to discover which bits were actually cut, so I
didn’t try to refer to things they’d never heard. I’d set it to rewind just
before I rang my wife, and the video-recorder (which I’d borrowed from Val, and
which was fortunately undamaged) automatically played pre-recorded videos.
Mrs Baird’s telly hadn’t been able to deal with it.
Most things, yes, but not King Lear. What was more, I hadn’t been on the
phone that long. Cordelia’s banishment had been enough. Forget about Lear’s
madness, Gloucester’s blinding and Cordelia’s death.
I was pretty shaken up, one way and another. But Val
invited me in to sit down and watch her telly, and generally looked after me.
As she still does, thank goodness, and has done for the past three years, two
of them as my wife.
Thank you, Mrs Baird.
Finished 23.54 November 5th 2001