Oh You Pretty Things

It is a very long time since I actually went out and bought a brand new television.  So long, in fact, that:

• The last television I inherited from a friend still had a back on it;
• I only belatedly realised that the local shopping centre no longer contained any electrical stores, all of which have decamped to far flung retail parks;
• The sheer extent of techo-porn out there cannot be underestimated.

 Over several weeks, alternating between indecision and despair, I wasted the better part of far too many evenings comparing spec and pricing and availability of one model after another across a range of websites of varying degrees of poor functionality.  A Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch came very much to mind.   It was only when another week off work loomed, meaning that I might be able to avoid taking a special day off to sit on grim home-delivery watch, that I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and gave up my credit card details.

“I come bearing goodies”, said the delivery man, who, remarkably enough, turned up on the day that he was supposed to, at more or less the time that he was supposed to, with the correct items.  This was a good start.  And it only took several sweary hours of different permutations of cables and connectors and menu options before I had everything – TV, Virgin Box, DVD recorder, Amplifier and speakers – set up and talking properly to each other.

A television is almost, but not quite, a necessity (I have spent more-or-less happy periods of my life TV-less, going a year once on a radio-only diet): a wonderful invention spoilt by shysters and dumb-downers.  I have tried to future proof myself as much as possible within a sensible budget so as (hopefully) not to have to get involved in the grizzly business of buying another one for a few years.   For all of the rubbish that’s on there (and I long ago scaled my TV ‘package’ back to the minimum to avoid paying for another 100 channels of rubbish) there are still just enough gems to justify the expense, though I feel increasingly akin to a tosher if I simply sit down and start browsing in a “Now then, let’s see what’s on t’box” mode. 

 

More often than not the TV is used for watching films or for the occasional bout with a box set, the latest of which, that was sitting, still cellophane-wrapped, on the shelf, was the fourth season of Mad Men.

As a test case for the new TV, Mad Men probably couldn’t be bettered, what with the styles and the sets and the all-too-perfectly framed scenes in the bars and offices and suburbs of sixties New York.  And that ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the show can be very addictive, leading to “just one more” back-to-backing of three or four episodes into the wee small hours.  Just as Waugh conceded that Brideshead Revisited was " infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, for rhetorical and ornamental language", a long session of Mad Men amounts to a binge of the indulgence and incorrectness of an America that was both better and worse than the America of today.  It’s only when you begin to really consider the plotlines and the situations that the characters get themselves into that the cracks begin to appear.

First and foremost is the terribly creaky back-story of Don Draper’s false identity.  It has always felt unnecessarily ill-judged and awkward.   Then there are the nods towards the Neanderthal sexual, social and racial mores of the day.  They feel just like that – nods – that are never properly explored or played out.  As Daniel Mendelsoh has put it in his admirable dissection of the show, “Mad Men keeps telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself.”

For all of that, Mad Men beats the hell out of anything being produced on British TV, most especially the recent, laughable, fifties-set The Hour.  I spoke to someone recently about modern British and American novels and just as there is still a vitality and sense of space in America, lacking in Britain, that leads authors such as Franzen to man-up and go into bat for the Great American Novel, there is a comparable level of ambition in American TV, even if it comes off half-cocked, like Mad Men, that the BBC simply isn’t capable, isn’t hard-wired, to even attempt.