Opening Lines: Definition Issue

WE’RE coming up to our fifth anniversary. It’s been tough, but, looking back, I think we can both say it was worth it. Obviously, you give up a lot, but if you work hard at it, you can make your new life. Next month will mark five years without a television.

The phrase ‘actually, we don’t have a TV’ is laden with meaning, as if accompanied by ‘we prefer to think and read and revive the dying art of conversation.’

We don’t. We just watch First Dates or One Born Every Minute on a laptop or a tablet. Our viewing has actually worsened over the years. When I watch a match now, the screen size is analogous to one you’d see in a FIFA ad for the global power of football in which an entire street is gathered around Uncle Joao’s black-and-white telly, which is placed on a rickety chair in a Brazilian favela. Five years out of the television loop means a number of things. When we visit people, we just want to look at their telly, regardless of what’s on. We stare at the set, entranced by its form and size, as if it were a Carravaggio, even though we’re watching Celebrity Come Dine With Me. Also, if we were to get a telly, I’m not sure where it would go. Since television first arrived, Irish living rooms have been designed around them; which is only right. The telly is the most important object in the room. Have you ever watched Murder She Wrote on a corner cabinet that contained Tipperary Crystal and a graduation photo?

But when a telly has been gone for a while, a room starts to arrange itself without it, like the trees growing over a ruin. And we have NO tolerance for ads anymore. They seem so long. Who could want all that stuff. Where’s the ‘skip’ button? We have forgotten the main purpose of ads — to allow you time to make the tea/hot water bottle/put out the dog.

Televisions themselves have changed a lot. I feel like I’ve been away and come back to the future. With Saorview, thousands of perfectly respectable, lumpy Panasonic and Philips and Beko tellies, with their grey suits, were ushered to the WEEE centre like redundant salarymen. They’ve all been replaced with skinnymalinks, who don’t look like they have any loyalty to the company and are made to only last a few months. And then there’s high definition. It’s supposed to make the television experience more immersive, more real. They are selling the notion that when you are watching it, you are in the room with the dinosaur or monster or footballer. But you’re not. The telly is on the wall, near a door calendar that has a reminder about an appointment to get a fungal infection in your foot seen-to.

But I wonder if ‘DEF’ has got too ‘HI’. I was in an appliance shop the other day and the latest telly was on offer. I’m not sure of the brand — the new, 60-foot, curved ULTRA-AMAZA-TRONTEC WITH SURROUND-PICTURE AND SMELLOVISION AND PEOPLE WHO WOULD ACTUALLY ATTACK YOU WITH ACTUAL GUNS IF YOU WERE WATCHING A WAR MOVIE.

There was a wildlife documentary on it. The leopard was stalking through the African savannah, doing whatever leopards do — probably waiting for the cameramen to feck off. He was real. Too real. I didn’t feel he was in the showroom with me, though. The definition was so high, he sort of glimmered like he was on a TV extravaganza with Ant and Dec.

Or, I could just be jealous, on our fifth anniversary, staring at a five-inch screen.