ANOTHER VOICE
Reflections on a week spent in front of the box
AUBERON WAUGH
It required a scene from Coronation Street, where a character called Trish Arm- strong faced prison after failing to pay a fine for television licence-dodging, to awak- en the social conscience of Alex Carlile, the `right-wing' member for Montgomery. Although I do not often think about Mr Carlile, I always assumed him to be at the sharp end of the law-and-order issue, along with all the public-school punishment freaks and people who failed to get into a grammar school. Yet Trish's imaginary plight moved him so strongly that he raised the matter in Parliament (and was later shown on television doing so), to say he considered it obscene that so many women were sent to prison for neglecting to pay their television fines: 278 women suffered this fate in 1993, being 7.5 per cent or one in 13 of all women sent to prison.
`The evidence suggests — just as in Trish's case — that it is the poor and often single mothers who are most likely to be imprisoned,' he told the Daily Mirror.
Perhaps it is a result of my own unfamil- iarity with the television medium — I have never knowingly watched Coronation Street in all the years it has been on, and I must admit that the sight of Mr Carlile, suddenly invading my bedroom in a Suffolk health farm, came as a severe shock — that I always find myself disagreeing violently with any opinion I hear expressed on it.
Of course the wretched Trish Armstrong should be sent to prison, preferably mana- cled, I found myself thinking. That is the only sanction within the British system against those who either refuse or are unable to pay fines. What is so sacred about a woman's right to watch television that she can defy the majesty of the law with impunity?
But then if the same opinion had been written by someone pleasant and sensible, like Matthew Parris in The Spectator, and if I had not had to see Alex Carlile mouthing it on television, I might have agreed with it whole-heartedly. Of course, it must be pos- sible to devise alternatives to imprisonment for those who default on their fines. A court order forbidding the criminal Trish Armstrong (in fact only an actress playing her part) from watching television would be poetically just. But it would achieve nothing because she would ignore it, which leaves us with the same option of sending her to prison. This is extremely expensive for the taxpayer and carries the further danger that she will make herself pregnant again.
However, a slight adjustment to the law might do the trick if it allowed courts to distrain any television set, including hired ones, in any house or flat where Trish Arm- strong was living. It would be the hire firm's responsibility to insure that its customers paid their television licences. Alternatively, we could resort to a system of summary jus- tice whereby fine defaulters like Trish would be visited by a bailiff who would either sprinkle her with itching powder (if a small sum was involved) or squirt her with CS gas (for larger sums).
If these innovations had the effect of causing fewer people to watch television, so much the better. In a society where nearly everybody watches television and can think or talk of nothing else, I find myself to a large extent cut off from the rest of the human race.
Why do people who watch television not complain about it more? Why are they not more worried by the evidence it affords about the condition of our civilisation, of the human race? I am not, in this instance, whining once again about the mass culture which television has created, with large parts inevitably aimed at the least reflective elements in society, although it is alarming how these programmes no longer seem to concentrate on appealing to the target audience's nicer side. In the last week at Shrublands, I have seen more black Ameri- can criminals (at least I assume they were criminals, it is not always easy to tell) punching, shooting, driving cars and shout- ing `f—' at each other than a middle-class Englishman has any business to see.
What worries me more are those aspects of television which try to be intelligent. This is not a criticism of Newsnight or Panorama, which are exceptions, and I saw an excellent programme about how middle- class couples in London treat their Far Eastern servants as slaves. Otherwise, it is all sixth-form stuff, with jokes that aren't funny and sequences apparently based on the wildest type of car advertisement. I wish I had jotted down the names of these dreadful programmes — Peter Yorke's portrait of the 1980s was memorably awful — but the poignant thing I have discovered about television is that nearly half the bet- ter programmes are about wild animals and birds.
More sophisticated readers will be impa- tient with this bumpkin and fogey who watches television three times a year and decides to lecture them on the subject, but it seems to me that familiarity may have blunted their perception of what is happen- ing. No doubt television is the opium of the masses, but we have no reason to believe that this concentration on animals is a sinis- ter plot to distract attention from traffic congestion and other domestic problems. Like the extraordinary obsession with health which we see in many newspapers, this obsession with wild animals must reflect some anxiety or longing in the tar- geted audience.
In the course of one wet afternoon in dampest Suffolk, I had mountain gorillas, Asian elephants and African flamingos wandering through my bedroom, all claim- ing to be threatened. There is something sad and worrying about all those Trish Armstrongs and Alex Carliles living in their disadvantaged urban habitats and worrying about animals in their wide open spaces, which they know about only through hearsay. Does it signify, perhaps, a general disenchantment with the human race? If American figures on the decline of the human sperm count are true, then we are a threatened species too. After a week of British television, the disappearance of the human race would come as a merciful relief. How much more strongly must those people feel who watch it all the time.
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