Television: Teacher, Mother, Secret Lover!
2004; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1559-7989
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoA fellow telephile gave me a Simpsons card on my last birthday. Homer sprawls atop a television in total abandon, head back, tongue lolling out. A caption reads Television-Teacher, Mother, Secret Lover! Like Homer, I love television and am regularly tempted to embrace my set and declare my passion. My true love and I first met in 1957 when I was five and it (or its American incarnation at least) was about ten. I had gone from a bleak, postwar Britain that was still awaiting the affluent sixties to the technological wonderland of the United States-cars, indoor plumbing, refrigerators, and best of all, the squat, ugly box that showed more exciting stories than the radio had ever told. One of my earliest American memories is of riding the back of the sofa pretending to be the Lone Ranger (with the hindsight of political correctness I know now that I should have been playing Tonto). Many of my childhood memories center on television: watching Perry Mason, One Step Beyond, and Western after Western with my parents; my patriotic English mother dragging me out of bed to watch the Trooping of the Colour on the news; the Twilight Zone scaring me witless. These television memories come with far warmer, fuzzier feelings than the rare recollections of childhood cinema-going. Then there was that terrible television-less period when the elderly set broke down for the last time and my parents were unable to afford another. I have a vivid recollection of standing in the playground watching my friends sliding along an ice patch and shouting Yab-adab-adoo. I had no idea what they were going on about and felt like a social pariah (for any of you who are similarly befuddled, that was Fred Flintstone's war-cry). So much for those critics who argue that television damages kids-it's the lack of television that does the damage! But television eventually returned, and along with it came The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Avengers, and Star Trek to fire the teenage imagination. We (the girls at least) acrimoniously debated the relative sex appeal of Napoleon and Ilya; we (girls again) wanted to master nuclear physics and throw bad guys over our shoulders; we (girls and boys this time) longed to board a star ship and explore the universe. And yes, in case you're wondering, I share the obligatory collective recollections of the Kennedy assassination and various space flights, although my memories mostly reflect my deep-seated and long-term preference for stories. But far from being a deluded fantasist who believed in a real United Network Command for Law Enforcement or Starfleet, I was a budding television scholar. My Star Trek fandom demanded an early fascination with the television industry: How bad were the ratings? Would NBC really shift it to 10 PM on Fridays? Would the network renew it for next year? I relished the behind-the-scenes views of my favorite programs' production that TV Guide and assorted teen magazines detailed (although in retrospect these reports were probably as fantastic as most of the shows). Television's a bit like pizza. It can be a shared experience, watched and talked about with friends and relatives. But there's also personal television, meant just for you. My early adolescence, as seems typical of that life-stage, saw the birth of many continuing passions-Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, Star Trek, and the cinema, among them. Star Trek I shared with others and Sherlock Holmes I read alone, but Shakespeare and late-night movies became personal television. Right around this time American television (probably PBS) began airing BBC Shakespeare (the black and white versions of the sixties, not the seventies/eighties complete play cycle). The broadcasts were big events for me. First came library preparation-reading a child's version of the play, and then tackling the play itself-and then came watching, suffused with the glow of righteous self-improvement. But there were more guilty pleasures. Crushes on several English actors (my mother's influence again) led me into cinephilia. …
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