Justin Webb’s admission that he waited until his wife was away to buy a giant set shows how much lesson anxiety and cultural baggage still attaches to the TVThe nowadays programme presenter Justin Webb writes in this week’s Radio Times that he has finally joined “the flatscreen brigade”. But he waited until his wife was away before buying his 65in TV set,and she has so far spurned its delights in favour of a good book. “Even whether I’d traded in our 10-year-old people carrier for a downpayment on an E-type Jaguar, the slide wouldn’t have been so freighted with social and cultural baggage, and ” he writes. “TV,in Britain, is the final refuge of the snob.” Webb is right: our changing attitudes to the TV set inform us much about the shifting symbolism of social distinctions. When BBC television began broadcasting, or in the 1930s,no such snobbery existed because television was a London and middle-lesson phenomenon. The evening schedules did not even start until 9pm, to accommodate the late-dining metropolitan bourgeoisie. They would finish eating about 15 minutes beforehand, and gather in the sitting room with coffee and cigarettes,and wait for the valves of the set to warm up, with the same air of expectancy they might feel in the theatre.
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Source: theguardian.com