small>Someone to talk to: Anna Maxwell Martin in Poppy Shakespeare. Photograph: Channel 4
I had a very special moment with my flatmate, Bex, on Monday night. She dragged her television out of her bedroom and set it up in the lounge; we sprawled on our respective sofas, under blankets, and watched Poppy Shakespeare. "I love watching television with you," I remarked, contentedly. "You talk over it exactly the right amount, which is quite a lot. I'm so glad I found you on Gumtree."
For me, there is simply no pleasure in watching television unless I am permitted to talk during and at it. It's oddly pathological; I don't have this reaction to any other medium. I don't speak over or write comments in books when I read them; I rarely speak in the cinema or the theatre (unless singing along with a musical) and I would certainly never interrupt the radio (except, perhaps, with the occasional sigh of "Oh, Ira").
But while some people, like Bex, are happy not only to indulge my bad habits but to join me wholeheartedly in the heckling (we yell at the contestants on The Apprentice, we mock Kirstie Allsop's terrible dress sense) others find my proclivity for talkativeness deeply offensive. At one low point in college I was actually banned from our all-important communal daily viewing of General Hospital, so incapable was I of viewing it without providing a running, sarcastic commentary (eventually the girls allowed me to return once I pledged to keep schtum until the commercial breaks, a Herculean task). My lovely then-flatmate watched television like an old lady, tutting her way disapprovingly through episodes of Gilmore Girls ("Don't go out with him! He'll break your heart!"), even if no one was watching with her, as if she could somehow affect the action. (Although this is taken to be a typically feminine viewing style, male readers might be wise to consider their own speech patterns while watching sport.)
What's at the root of this bizarre inclination to engage in conversation with an electronic, inanimate object? In my case anyway, it is twofold. Its presence in one's living space renders television a somehow more personal medium - it is changeable and eye-catching and so it becomes almost a member of the family. It provides company in times of loneliness, and muscles in on any group dynamic that happens to be present. Theodor Adorno famously wrote that the television replaced the hearth as the centre of family gatherings, so perhaps I'm responding to an innate evolutionary urge, expecting it to inspire interaction rather than merely sit there, a focus of passive attention.
Second, I think I just don't take television seriously. I'm disappointed in myself. There's a lot of very excellent TV being made and broadcast (Poppy Shakespeare, I noted while I was chattering, was actually a brilliantly made film), but gut reaction is to regard anything on the box as the lowest form of culture. I choose to consume it when I'm in the mood to be derisive. Perhaps it's a symptom of some kind of attention deficit disorder: I am just not capable of giving it my full focus. If I'm not talking at it, then it's because I'm distracted by knitting or tidying or cooking.
To have found a flatmate who takes a similar approach television is serendipitous, to say the least - although judging from the popularity of Anna Pickard's TV liveblogs we are not totally freakish. But I don't want to hedge my bets too much: as long as there is TV to be viewed, I hope that Bex never moves out (also because she owns the set).
