“You should give this thing on Netflix a watch, I reckon.” Reader, I’m sure you had to suffer variations on this formula over the preceding weekend if you have parents of a certain age. Practically everyone I know, even the outwardly normal ones, have been loudly evangelised to “give it a watch”. As such, I do not intend to comment on Adolescence — a nasty, bullying piece of propaganda which will be forgotten in less than a year. Something I hope shall never be forgotten, ever, is the splendid utterance by one of the educated metropolitan elites who staff our world-beating, rolls-royce judiciary in a vandalism case, that the actions of the perpetrators constituted “the antithesis of everything Paddington [bear] stands for … ” I don’t think I’ve ever lived through two weeks in which the internet trolls have been more thoroughly owned.
There is a low-Postmodern congruency in how a show intended to advertise the insidious effects of the internet has demonstrated, perfectly, the ability of television to serve as the ultimate vector of fake news. Within hours of Adolescence being released on Netflix, the Prime Minister was demanding the film be shown “in Parliament, and in schools”. Debates were held in the House of Commons about how the leaders of the land should respond to an event which was literally fictional. None of the “misinformation” spread by social media since 2016 has approached this scale of mendacious influence: vast numbers of vulnerable, older people will now be convinced that the events of Adolescence actually happened — that devotees of raffish e-book salesmen routinely commit terror attacks, that censorship is acceptable north of the equator and that any male under 30 who turns down an extra ticket to the Mrs Brown’s Boys Musical ought to be drone-striked before he can harm others and himself.
A huge swathe of the population over-60 advocate plainly barmy totalitarian policies
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It is not the first time the addiction to television of the older population (who own most of the property and whose voices consequently carry the furthest in our democracy) has distorted our politics. Some may remember the Amazon production A Very Royal Scandal in which Ruth Wilson escaped the grubby ignominy of portraying Agatha Christie to fulfill a childhood dream of portraying Emily Maitlis, host of the Newsagents podcast, in her interview with HRH Andrew Duke of York. If you watched this programme, with no exposure to the issue besides the vicissitudes of a print-broadcast news cycle, you would be led to the rather Panglossian conclusion Prince Andrew had, in fact, seen some sort of tangible consequences for his misdeeds. That Maitlis’s interview had precipitated genuine legal consequences for a man implicated in foreign spy-rings and child abuse — consequences, one would hope, similar to those faced by hundreds of autistic teenagers victimised by PREVENT laws championed in Adolescence.
You might be surprised to learn that, in the real world, Uncle Andy continues to lead an existence of blithe luxury expensed to the ever-tolerant British taxpayer. You might start calling people who raise this uncomfortable fact “conspiracy theorists”. Baffled at how they arrive at their conclusions, you will start to assume they are manipulated by sinister forces.
Yes! It is the internet … the smartphones in schools. Putin hacked question time to stop Ed Miliband winning the 2015 election. In this way, a huge swathe of the population over-60 come to see politics in conspiratorial terms. They refuse to see their fellow citizens as arguing in good faith and advocate plainly barmy totalitarian policies as a result. If you are tempted to consider our proposals radical, keep in mind that the gerontocracy will show no reciprocal mercy; it is now normal in Britain for putatively centre-right groups to propose banning mobile phones for anyone under the age of 16. Television is a far greater threat to our democracy than the internet.
Why does the Idiot’s Lantern hold such a power over those enthralled to it? Marshall McLuhan, the great bard of media studies, distinguishes between “hot” media which drains the energy of the consumer and “cold” media which challenges the audience to actively imbue it with meaning. He classes T.V. in the former category and books in the latter. If I read a book, I have to imagine what the characters are doing. When you watch T.V, you are entirely sedate; you hear the words of someone else and watch moving footage which your brain perceives as “reality”. The only real choice you may exercise is changing the channel. I would venture, contra many idle interpreters, that the internet is in fact a “cold” medium more akin to literary culture than television. If I read a post on X, or indeed, an article in The Critic which claims polar bears live to 100 years old, I can use search engines to establish whether this is true or not. If David Attenborough tells me it is so, I have no recourse to alternative information within the medium. I basically have to generate the world of “online” for myself — when I do so, it activates different parts of the brain to watching a performance.
Television gives its audiences the impression of a fake consensus
Television is also an inherently collectivist medium. In its barbaric heyday, everyone would watch the same thing, at the same time, and talk about for the next week at the same jobs. It requires a homogenisation of taste you do not see in books or online content. When George Orwell wrote 1984, he wasn’t writing about a particular ideology or state — he was writing about television from the perspective of a man steeped in literary culture. It didn’t matter if Britain or the USA were “democracies” on paper: the mind which had formed democracy was a literary mind, and it was being replaced by a collectivist, unquestioning T.V. mind which knew only how to conform. What use was “the rule of law”, when the average person would soon struggle to read case law from a mere twenty years ago? What use was “capitalism” if the average person could be conned into thinking “cornflakes” were a vegetable by autotones? What use was “free speech” when nobody cared what you had to say? It was only with the rise of the internet that we began to rediscover a semblance of these things, often finding them uncongenial by long habit of disuse.
It is for this reason we have always taken a very hard line in the occasional debates on what is called “the Right” over the BBC. Conservatives are, of course, correct that the BBC is biased against them but it goes beyond that; the whole medium of television is inherently tied to the 20th century project of anti-individualist mass society. Television gives its audiences the impression of a fake consensus, and it encourages them to lash out when this consensus isn’t reflected in reality. It has turned beloved grandparents and newspaper columnists into swivel-eyed Gauleiters ranting about how Elon Musk is a Nazi and how there’s no such thing as a grooming gang. It inherently weakens society. To imagine “taking over the BBC” is like imagining “taking over” the Orgburo. No, my friends. We are not merely going to privatise the BBC. We are not merely going to shut down the BBC. We are going to stop all terrestrial T.V. broadcasts from using public infrastructure.
We have done this before. We did it to analogue T.V. Between 2007 and 2012, all analogue T.V. transmitters in the United Kingdom were switched off. We did the same to fax. In 2023, after a consultation, OfCom announced that telecoms providers would not have to serve fax machine users as a default. It is entirely reasonable to imagine a world where the same is done for all television. As, I’m sure, fax enthusiasts will continue to use the machines amongst themselves and aficionados for CB radios maintain their hobby, those who lament the 21st century will be welcome to build their own transmitters, launch their own satellites and pay for their own cables — provided none of this interferes with public infrastructure.
“But television brings people together!” they cry. Well, lots of things “bring people together” — incest, for example, or putting cats on trial for murder. Eventually, the civilised, forward-thinking parts of humanity simply have to put their feet down and say, “No, sorry, the commie-box has got to go.” I don’t want to live in a country with a “national discourse”, anymore than I want to live in a country with “national service” or a “dear leader”. More importantly, I don’t want the people who participate in that discourse to influence how I live my life on recommendation of fictional characters. After our time travel back to 2009, we switch on X.com to see millions of Americans watch in awe as rockets powered through their skies and criminals were brought to justice at light-speed. O mia patria si bella e perduta! … I felt like I wanted to cry. Many in our great land now ponder how to fix Broken Britain, yet the answer is not limited to zoning laws and civil service protocols. There is a deep spiritual rot making material conditions like these seem normal. To return to the country of Isambard Kingdom Brunel we must stop being the country of Sir Jim — let us dare to dream of a future without television.
