Size matters ... Panasonic's 150-inch HD plasma. Photograph: David Paul Morris/Getty Images
It's the stretch-Humvee of televisions: a TV so gigantic that it's pretty well obscene. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic has unveiled the most stupidly big flat-screen television in the world: a 150-inch monster, six feet by 11 feet. It weighs 500 lbs and it costs £50,000. As tall as a man, pretty much as wide as two men lying end to end. You'd need a gigantic pub permanently tuned to Setanta Sports to justify its existence. But Panasonic reckon that individuals will buy it for their homes. They should supply a vat of lager and a tube of Pringles the size of a train carriage to go with it.
In the last century, the film-makers were so threatened by television they produced epics that TV couldn't match. Perhaps that's how the TV manufacturers feel now that people are spending more time on the net, consuming movies on their laptops or iPods. As an alternative they have to offer sheer, flat-screen, hi-def scale.
Part of me yearns, horribly, for the new Panasonic behemoth - a television so large, that like a grand piano, it would be touch-and-go if it could ever be delivered into any normal house at all. I'd at least like to witness it, in all its strange, terrible and pointless glory, at a local branch of Dixons.
But the news of its existence coincided with a very bizarre experience I had over the Christmas break: a journey back into the TV-consuming world of my childhood. It's more Pooter than Proust, but I relate it for you here anyway.
I was taking my three-year-old to the Science Museum. We were going to the water-play area in the basement, and found ourselves going past a display cabinet of TV sets from the past: absurdly dusty, boxy old things, all of them, like something Dr Frankenstein would have in his lab. And then - wham. I came face to face with the TV set that we used to have in our house when I was growing up in the 70s: a set so eccentric-looking that I had spent my adult life until that moment semi-seriously convinced that it was the only one in existence. In a momentary panic, I looked around wildly at the other displays. What else had the Science Museum nicked from our front room? The lamps? The sofas? My mum?
But there it was. Something that as a child I thought was cutting-edge was now under glass in the Science Museum. It was a Sony Trinitron KV1300UB, first manufactured in 1970, which I have now discovered has a bit of a cult following on the web and on eBay. It had a weird pale-wood surround and the smallest, teeny-weeniest, itsy-bitsiest screen ever offered to the public: about ten inches. It had a tuning dial like a radio and an on/off button that, oddly, had to be pulled out to turn the thing on.
With that semi-wooden feature competing with the metallic details elsewhere on the set, I think it might have been transitional, in design terms, between the era when people still thought televisions had to be heavy items of furniture, like sideboards, and when they had to be gadgety things made of glass and steel.
But by golly, I loved it. We all loved it. Other richer kids in my class sneered at it horribly, but this was my great technological and social-status leap forward from the old black-and-white telly we used to have, and it dominated our front room, small as it was. Important post would be placed reverently on top of it for my parents to pick up when they returned in the evening. I remember laying the Maths O-level paper I had taken one summer on top of it, for my father to read when he returned home. Nowhere in the house was as important, or prominent.
It was on the Sony Trinitron KV1300UB that we discovered that the jerseys of the Star Trek crew (first generation) were of different colours. It was on the Sony Trinitron KV1300UB that we thrilled to the comic adventures of Tom and Barbara and Jerry and Margo -- those daringly childless couples -- on The Good Life. It was on the Sony Trinitron KV1300UB that I saw the dead body of Chairman Mao lying in state in Beijing on the early evening news and realised it was the first dead body, live or virtual, that I had ever seen. It was on the Sony Trinitron KV1300UB that we watched Tony Curtis and Roger Moore in The Persuaders on Friday nights, and it was on the Sony Trinitron KV1300UB that I watched David McCallum on a 70s sci-fi show called The Invisible Man, a programme now so utterly forgotten that I think I might have imagined it.
I watched Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective on this, and realised that it was the most brilliant thing I had ever seen on television. And I vividly recall my father angrily turning it off, literally hitting the knob into the off position, when he saw that my sister and I were watching a documentary which he considered was unsuitable for us. It was the scene of family interaction.
And all of it on a screen the size of a matchbox. This single object was the most densely real, intensely considered and consumed object in the house.
And yet, paradoxically, the poky, boxy little set was in its way more prominent as a domestic object than today's flat screen TVs. The new generation have screens which get bigger and bigger and flatter and flatter, their mass compressed and flattened out and placed on the wall. They are reduced from two dimensions to one. The screen itself takes up far much more of its physical space, and the message is now bigger than the medium. They don't have quaint surrounds or fascias, still less legs, like a drinks cabinet. Their physical presence is steadily withdrawn; the screens themselves are now spreading out, in the poet's words, like gold to airy thinness beat.
And the individual set itself is less important as a purveyor of TV, now that there are so many ways that television can be consumed.
Well, that's enough TV-related nostalgia for the time being. But it's a weird and horribly ageing feeling to see something from your past under glass at the Science Museum, for gawd's sake.
Does anyone own a fully functioning Sony Trinitron KV1300UB?
Do they fancy selling it to me?
