When I first heard this quote on Friends, I had to laugh – what do people without TVs point their furniture at? At home, all our furniture is – and always has been – pointed squarely at the small screen, and just about everyone I can think of is in the same boat. The TV is the focal point of our living space.
If we go right back to the very start of TV, the box was accorded pride-of-place because it symbolised the resident family’s achievement of the middle-class ideal; the “shining centre of the home”, it was one of the must-have items of the ’50s.(1)
Fast-forward fifty years and in my humble childhood abode the television wasn’t so shiny: our first TV was a second-hand gift from my grandparents that was two decades older than me. It was brown, showed ABC in black and white, and even as an only child the lack of remote lead to several arguments regarding whose turn it was to get up. And yet this batty old gogglebox still sat proudly in the centre of the room.
Because the symbolic image of the family huddled around the TV hasn’t changed: the format of TV is bound up with ideas of domesticity and even the content of programming frequently reflects this theme. As Ellis eloquently puts it: “The particular ideological notion of the nuclear family in its domestic setting provides the overarching conception within which TV broadcast operates.” (2)
And yet this conception of the happy wife, husband and two children is becoming increasingly problematic: as Morley points out, this family dynamic accounts for less than 5% of households [in Britain]. (3) Certainly, my own parents divorced when I was fifteen, and our one household became two.
Further railing against this idea of the shiny family with their happy box is the persistent notion that there is something uncultured, mind-numbing and even dangerous about TV. I remember my mother insisting on a tech-free meal at the table until I reached adolescence, claiming that all the studies show TV over dinner tears down families and causes diabetes (or something, I wasn’t paying that much attention). This derision for TV has existed since its inception and can be seen afresh in most corners of the internet (think “the quality of TV today” and “they won’t be getting my viewership!”)
So with a not-so-unified family unit, at least five years of a static-y hand-me-down and a preference for (albeit sometimes reluctant) dining room meals, why did our family still keep the TV at centre stage?
I think the answer is conversation – the very thing my mother sought to inspire when we sat down together at the dinner table. We’ve all heard of ‘water-cooler moments’, the events that get you talking at the office the next day; but what about the conversations we have as the show’s still going? The ‘Oh My God‘s and the ‘No they didn’t‘s and, most importantly, ‘that reminds me . . .‘
Because some of the best memories I have of childhood are not of TV per se, but of the conversations and, more importantly, laughter that I shared because of it. Lull refers to the “comunicative substance which surrounds the viewing experience” (4), and my mind turns to political conversations sparked by the nightly news; stories remembered thanks to a visual cue; or even just yelling at my mother through the bathroom door after watching the genius of the IT Crowd.
Morley suggests that the shared possession of the TV is what defines a household (5), but I disagree. Shared conversation and experience is what defines a household – and to an extent a family – and TV is just one thing that helps to inspire those intimate and hilarious moments. That’s why the TV is at the centre of the room. And besides, what else would the furniture point at?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qs1qxasw5c
Footnotes
(1) Morley, David. Home Territories. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. P88
(2) Ellis, John. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. P115
(3) Ellis, John. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. P114
(4) Lull, James. “The Social Uses of Television”. Human Communication Research 6.3 (1980): 197-209. P198
(5) Morley, David. Home Territories. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. P89