Peter Bromhead: Feigning illness to escape TV watching

Cartoon / Peter Bromhead

Opinion

For parents desperately trying to unglue their offspring from the telly screen, it will come as a surprise to learn that I was prepared to feign illness to dodge viewing TV programmes when I was young.

In the immediate postwar years in England I was invited to visit the home of somebody incredibly wealthy, accompanied by my aunt, who knew the incredibly wealthy man's wife.

The couple had bought one of the first television sets in Britain. The event was such a big deal that even the local newspapers gave it coverage, with photos of the purchasers leaning casually on an enormous mahogany box, the size of a kitchen bench, with a microscopic glass screen, reminiscent of a Cyclops eye.

It seems laughable today that the invitation to view an evening's telly came via the post on a printed gold-embossed card.

I had to wear my best clothes, a tie and polish my shoes for the occasion. At the incredibly wealthy family's home, I was ushered into a chintzy lounge and ordered to sit on an upright chair facing the diminutive screen.

The programme started at 7pm and finished at 10pm.

As the lounge lights dimmed, my aunt quietly informed me that I was indeed a lucky boy - about to view the first staged television production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

I cannot describe how excruciatingly dull it all seemed.

Filmed in black and white, with only two camera positions left and right of the stage, Troilus and Cressida dragged on forever, unhelped by muffled sound. From Priam's palace we moved back and forth to Agamemnon's tent or Pandarus' courtyard.

When we finally reached Act 5, Scene 10, where Pandarus prattles on and on about his aching bones, I was ready to jump screaming out of the incredibly wealthy man's lounge window.

Unfortunately, being a polite, well-mannered lad, I must have appeared over-enthusiastic with my thanks on leaving, because two weeks later I was invited back to view another gruelling evening, this time a performance of Shakespeare's equally boring tragedy Titus Andronicus.

To escape, I feigned illness to escape the session.

Luckily, I was not invited again.

Apparently, the incredibly wealthy owners of one of the first TV receivers in post-war Britain found themselves back in the news the following week, recorded as one of the first consumers to have their television set stolen.