Esther McCarthy: The Traitors shows why we should bring back watching TV as a family

Esther argues for the merits of fighting for a good spot on the couch and watching telly together as a family

Esther McCarthy: 'There’d be no manosphere today if our boys started watching the videos in a room full of family'

SHUT uuuuuuuuup.

Push over. COP ON. That’s MY glass. Stop chewing so loud! Gah! Who farted? Shhhhhh.. HOW many actual ads are there? Can we skip them?

That’s the soundtrack to Sunday night in our house, all of us wedged onto a couch, watching The Traitors. We are not used to watching live telly together, it’s slowly fallen away. And I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Growing up, bar the immutable routine of having the news on at six and nine, the TV was Mam’s domain — that’s right, she was in charge of BOTH channels. We were ahead of the curve, mind — we had a VCR, the kind that loaded in from the top, and we owned three videos, ooh, we were the envy of the road. We watched Enter the Ninja so much we wore it out.

Then the multichannel arrived, and we didn’t know ourselves. More choice and more couches to colonise. The younger of us sat on the floor or balanced on the edge of something. Mam handed out the nom noms (a Black Magic here, a square of Turkish Delight there).

I think we are missing out now, all of us clung to our own screens instead of gathered around the one. Important stuff was happening while we watched communally, even if we didn’t know it at the time. Take the sitcoms, it was the USA we loved ( Fawlty Towers notwithstanding). Remember Family Ties, Mork and Mindy, Small Wonder, The Greatest American Hero, Diff’rent Strokes. Americans seemed so and cool and aspirational.

The technicolour families with their massive fridges and sidewalks. Remember staying really quiet so you’d be forgotten about in the corner and get to stay up to watch Dallas. Awestruck at the shoulder pads and the backstabbing and the smooching. Trying to figure out why anyone would fall for JR’s dastardly charm when Bobby was RIGHT THERE, and hearing your mam mutter: “I’d chop his balls off” from the armchair when JR was mean to Sue Ellen. See, we were learning about life.

On telly, the baddy always got his comeuppance and the goodies always won. Miami Vice always caught their perp, without having to so much as roll down their sleeves. It was rife with machoism and stereotypes you wouldn’t get away with now, but when something outrageous happened on screen, you weren’t watching it alone, you had older and wiser people to call out the bull.

There’d be no manosphere today if our boys started watching the videos in a room full of family — imagine all the Irish grannies in all the sitting rooms around the country taking the mickey out of those Tate tools — they’d be objects of derision, instead of being allowed snake into our kids’ brains unfiltered by the mockery of a woman who raised 15 children, ran a dairy farm, and did the accounts for five businesses.

Then there were the quiz shows. Watching 15 to 1, you realised your parents actually knew stuff you didn’t — an unsettling revelation. I wish my own crowd of langballs would sit down and watch Catchphrase with me, because I am elite at that show. Maybe then I’d get a bit of respect around here.

And remember when Saturday nights meant watching Blind Date, getting ready to go out
ourselves, backcombing our hair, hoping to get a slobber at the disco, honing our red-flag radar by clocking the lads on the telly and picking out the numpties.

Telly was a handy way to wise up, too. If something bad or strange was happening on a show, it felt safe to ask about it while everyone’s eyes were on the screen instead of on you.

Home and Away would be on in the background when we got in from school, everyone pottering about, and sure that covered the lot: teen pregnancy, affairs, toxic friendships, bad boyfriends, grown-ups acting like children, drink, drugs… eh, MORAG.

We learned the right and wrong of it from our own families, sitting right there
beside us.

That’s how wisdom gets passed on, doing things together. When the next generation doesn’t have a scoffing older sister roaring at the eejit on the screen, they’re missing out. When there’s no grandad or granny reminiscing about their own dating days during the wedding episode of Neighbours, we all miss out.

Nowadays it’s doomscrolling, fake nonsense, nasty comments, evil algorithms knowing when young girls delete a selfie and deciding to push beauty products to their feed, and when the kids are watching it alone, there’s no one there to challenge it, to talk it through, to say: “Jeepers, that doesn’t seem like a great idea.”

There’s no Judge Judy to shout: “BALONEY!”. No Ally McBeal to give a rousing defence of smart women in short skirts.

So bring back the tradition, I say. Get everyone back on the one couch. Let them fight over the good spot, and put their smelly feet on each other.

That racket isn’t the problem, shur, it’s the whole point.