Going up to Dave 'the angler' Protter's place in Downie Combe used to be fun. Football games in the yard, table tennis, sparring with boxing gloves, larking around... Then in the twinkling of an eye everything changed. It changed the moment the Protters got one! In fact whole swathes of the country have been changing the moment people get one! This hunger for getting one is becoming so intense that a time is fast approaching when time itself will have to be re-classified. It will be goodbye to all the old BC and Anno Domini, BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE stuff. The new parameters of time are BTV (Before TeleVision) and ATV (AfterTeleVision). Nothing is going to be the same again. For example in the old BTV days 'outdoors' was where
kids preferred to be. You could knock on someone's front door and be confident that you would be heard. Today knocks on doors are likely to be drowned out by the noise that emanates from the black oblong viewing machine. And it is no use agoing around to the front and banging on the window as the "Caution: Goggle Box Viewers At Work!" curtains will almost certainly be drawn
and the noise will continue unabated.
The ATV triumph of the 'great indoors' is a wondrous sight to behold. From one end of the country to another covens of glazed-eyes addicts are slumped over their television sets in
Shanghai style opium den trance-like states. Break the quarantine on speaking and you will be hissed and shushed back into the obligatory ATV mute mode. When you finally take your leave and bid a fond farewell the addicts' leaden eyelids will barely register the sweet sorrow of your tip-toed departure.
It is not just in salubrious Downie Combe but in down-market Twiverton as well that the big "when are you getting one?" question is winging its all seeing/all watching way around. No one likes being left behind when everyone else is surfing on a Big Wave of cultural-technological change. The dissident idea that a few rebels on Prefab Estate Island could break away from the main and refuse to bow the knee to eye glazed convention was romantic mythology. It was ditched overboard the moment the first prefab on the estate went out and got one.
The slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab got one way back in 1954! 'Tubby' Lard's family was only a month behind. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic might come out with loads of radical talk but he has had one for yonks. The other week even the Slileys went out and got one! Anyone who is still without one feel like a disenfranchised serf washed up from the Middle Ages. No one talks about wireless programmes anymore. Say "did you hear?" rather than "did you see?" and they will cut you dead. The only exception is The Goons (still going strong since 1950).
The ATV era is not going to go away. The "when are you going to get one?" question is here for keeps. It paces up and down the road outside, pokes its shiny screened-face through the windows, blasts out phoney synthetic pseudo-laughter to the left of us and to the right of us, prods its long silver aerial through our letter-box. It has the dwindling band of wireless only households completely surrounded. It follows the bus they take home. It is on the lips of the milkman everytime he asks to be paid. You might have been able to evade it back in 1955 but
there is no evading it now. Even the birds that circle above the prefab roofs are starting to screech the same question out: "When the heck are you getting one!"