When I was a child, television was the big baddie that threatened to wreck family life as we knew it. My adolescence was peppered with parental shouts from the kitchen that we should turn off the telly and do something more interesting instead – there was even a TV programme called Why Don’t You … which had the full title Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?
But how life changes, and how innocent those voices of doom from the 1970s and 80s now sound. Because in today’s more fractured family, a shared experience of a TV programme at least means we’re together, in the same place, doing the same thing at the same time – and that’s an increasingly rare experience for parents and their children, and certainly for parents like me whose children are teenagers.
That TV is the glue of family life, rather than its nemesis, is a trend picked up by Bishop Nick Baines of Leeds, who in this week’s Radio Times even likens the shared companionship of relatives watching the box together to the biblical accounts of the shepherds and the magi travelling across the countryside to pay homage to the newborn Jesus in his stable.
And he’s right. I’m not much of a TV lover, but there are times when, if I see my husband and our daughters (13 and 17) sitting in front of the TV set, I’ll sit down just because it’s a family moment – and they are rare. What’s much more likely of an evening in my house, as in many others, I’m sure, is that we’ll all be in separate rooms watching different programmes on different devices. There have even been times when several people are watching Homeland or House of Cards separately – and even more annoyingly, the Netflix account won’t let me in because it’s already in use on too many other devices.
So yes: as the bishop says, watching telly really could be the new midnight mass, carol service or Sunday eucharist. For generations, worshipping together was a shared or bonding family experience, but these days how many families do that? I find it quite refreshing to hear a bishop having a vista that’s so much wider than a narrow vision of church: church is really all about community – God and his or her existence, it seems to me, is a quite separate issue. Watching telly needn’t be less godly than listening to a sermon; indeed, if you’re enjoying the TV and feeling battered by the sermon, God is probably rather closer to you in the first than the second experience.
For Christmas 2015, church isn’t going to be a bonding experience for many families: but the telly, in this age when too many of us are glued to our mobile phones or our tablets much of the time, really could give us some genuine moments of togetherness. Most importantly of all, a television programme could even give us what families most need if they’re to survive, which is the opportunity to laugh together; and we certainly don’t get many chances to do that in church, or at least, not at the church services I attend.
