Big TV
Up to last week we got by with a TV set small enough to hide in a cupboard. It was fine except that the advent of widescreen TV had chopped the picture so that if you were watching a film with two people sitting on either side of a table all you could see were their noses.
It was time for a change so I asked our eldest boy, John, to do a bit of market research. Nothing much happened until I had a call last week from John and his mother who had found themselves in the TV shop. There was a TV with money knocked off and it would amply fulfill our needs.
I felt a bit pressured but gave it my seal of approval without really understanding what was meant by a 40-inch screen. There's a big difference between something 17 inches wide that fits in a cupboard and 40 inches which is like the deck of an aircraft carrier.
I couldn't believe it when I saw it. It was a pub TV - the kind of TV screen that follows you all around the house. I don't know whether you have ever seen the Big Lebowski (one of my favourite films, incidentally) but there is a scene early on when the main character, The Dude (played by Jeff Bridges), is irritated because an intruder has urinated on a carpet that he liked because it "tied the room together."
Well I like to think that the furniture we have in our living room kind of ties the room together in normal circumstances. But the big black presence of this new TV screen in the corner of the room just dominated everything. I slept on it but the TV invaded my dreams and I felt no better the next morning. The new TV would have to go.
It was an unpopular decision with the boys but I think its 32-inches-wide replacement is a reasonable compromise, bigger than I would prefer but not so big that it resembles George Orwell's original concept of Big Brother.
This may seem a snobbish observation but I wonder if there is a class element in TV choice? I associate very large TVs with a certain kind of brashness, advertising where your priorities lie. I like my TVs to be small, understated and off-centre. It's as if I'm making a statement that the TV is not an important part of my life.
I'm thinking, however, that this is something of a Pooterish attitude. My kids tell me that young people all like big TV screens and that I am out of touch. Our youngest son, George, is particularly irked that we paid an extra £50 for the smaller TV (that was not a sale bargain). "How could anyone pay £50 more for a smaller TV?" he says.
Yet it's not small. The TV is out of the cupboard, demanding to be watched. We are big TV people now and that makes me uncomfortable.
It was time for a change so I asked our eldest boy, John, to do a bit of market research. Nothing much happened until I had a call last week from John and his mother who had found themselves in the TV shop. There was a TV with money knocked off and it would amply fulfill our needs.
I felt a bit pressured but gave it my seal of approval without really understanding what was meant by a 40-inch screen. There's a big difference between something 17 inches wide that fits in a cupboard and 40 inches which is like the deck of an aircraft carrier.
I couldn't believe it when I saw it. It was a pub TV - the kind of TV screen that follows you all around the house. I don't know whether you have ever seen the Big Lebowski (one of my favourite films, incidentally) but there is a scene early on when the main character, The Dude (played by Jeff Bridges), is irritated because an intruder has urinated on a carpet that he liked because it "tied the room together."
Well I like to think that the furniture we have in our living room kind of ties the room together in normal circumstances. But the big black presence of this new TV screen in the corner of the room just dominated everything. I slept on it but the TV invaded my dreams and I felt no better the next morning. The new TV would have to go.
It was an unpopular decision with the boys but I think its 32-inches-wide replacement is a reasonable compromise, bigger than I would prefer but not so big that it resembles George Orwell's original concept of Big Brother.
This may seem a snobbish observation but I wonder if there is a class element in TV choice? I associate very large TVs with a certain kind of brashness, advertising where your priorities lie. I like my TVs to be small, understated and off-centre. It's as if I'm making a statement that the TV is not an important part of my life.
I'm thinking, however, that this is something of a Pooterish attitude. My kids tell me that young people all like big TV screens and that I am out of touch. Our youngest son, George, is particularly irked that we paid an extra £50 for the smaller TV (that was not a sale bargain). "How could anyone pay £50 more for a smaller TV?" he says.
Yet it's not small. The TV is out of the cupboard, demanding to be watched. We are big TV people now and that makes me uncomfortable.
Labels: Jeff Bridges, Pooterish, The Big Lebowski, The Dude, TV
posted by Richard Donkin at
3:04 PM
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