“Telly hijacks tired brains and takes them on holiday”

MY LATE father had a kind, gentle soul and a heart as soft and yielding as butter.

His will, however, was as inflexible as a reinforced steel joist. Riveted in place by fixed opinion and fastened by moral certainty, sometimes his will was totally intractable.

There were a few things you couldn’t budge him on. For example, he believed, with the tenacious fanaticism of an Afghani resistance fighter, that telly leached vital things like sense and sensibility from his children’s brains. He also believed that telly, by way of popular culture programmes like Top of the Pops, supplanted these leached virtues with other things like gormlessness and vice. The six of us tried, with the tenacious fanaticism of Afghani resistance fighters, to change his mind, but we failed. He was utterly impervious to our resistance answering any of our questions regarding the basis of his authority with, ‘because I said so’ or, ‘you’ll thank me for it one day’. We may as well have pitted our wits against that reinforced steel joint.