“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.

At the time it seemed to us the nature of my dad’s ban was: Blanket, Apart From When He Wanted Us To Watch Something Educational or Funny, Which In Truth He Wanted To Watch Himself. In these instances, he’d corral his six children into the sitting room to watch either turgid programmes on astronomy/wildlife/current affairs or Fawlty Towers/Rising Damp.

So in the absence of popular culture being beamed into our lives on a nightly basis, we amused ourselves with the more ancient staples of family life: bickering and books.

My dad was as committed and coercive about inculcating a love of books in his kids as he was about stopping us from watching telly. Every day from the age of seven, he dispatched us into the sitting room to read for an hour and a half, so that by the time each of us reached the age of mutiny and dissent (13), we were so hooked on books that calling an uprising against his reading regime would have been self-sabotage.

My dad’s prediction, ‘you’ll thank me for it one day’ was spookily prescient. I do indeed thank him for his telly-ban, insofar as it forced me into a lifelong, passionate love affair with books. But here’s the thing, I’m all for telly — not all day or even every day — the apple hasn’t fallen that far from the tree — and here are the reasons why:

1. Telly hijacks tired brains and takes them on holiday. When my brain gets hijacked by Strictly Come Dancing, it has precisely the same effect on me as lying on a beach with a book, ie, I’m stimulated and anaesthetised. Strictly Come Dancing has also given rise to an occasion where my sister-in-law showed off her Salsa skills next to the telly, after drinking three quarters of a bottle of Chardonnay. No book has made me laugh as much.

2. Master Chef has the power to unite a family in a way the dinner table doesn’t. At some point during a family meal, someone will accuse someone else of eating like a pony, which will tip delicate convivial ambience into jarring din. When we watch X Factor, the ambience is more robust; insults are hurled at the telly instead.

3. Watching telly can give rise to surprisingly serious debate. Recently, my mother-in-law put down the newspaper, glanced at the telly and asked her grand-daughters why Rihanna was wearing ‘just knickers’, which prompted an interesting discussion as to why every single female mega pop-star, who’s rich and powerful enough to call the shots, feels obliged to show her bottom and grind it to camera, while rich and powerful male pop-stars don’t.

4. If your children watch at least some of the same programmes as the rest of the nation, it means that when people make references to popular culture, they’ll get them. They will not have to spend time perfecting a middle distance, nonchalant gaze feeling stupid, like I had to whenever my friends talked about Top of the Pops.

5. Sunday, 9pm + Downton Abbey + a cup of tea + the fact that no-one else wants to watch it so I can lie on the sofa in peace = an advanced meditative state which = the knock-on effect of being good for general family morale.

6. And last, but not least, my children, upon whom I did not impose a telly embargo, have no more gormlessness or vice and no less sense and sensibility than me.