So, I was all geared up for a television-free election. Who needs it? I have the internet, blogs, YouTube, the radio, and, in a truly Victorian spirit, printed newspapers. I planned it out nicely: not just the Guardian but a selection of the papers every morning, plus Radio 4, and then go online ... but history has made a fool of me again.
Sick of reality shows, we got rid of our telly a few years ago. I don't despise television; it helped educate me. It was more the sense of the medium betraying its best possibilities that came to disgust me; the descent of British television from the glory days of Jacob Bronowski to what seemed little more than mental wallpaper. And there are a lot of advantages to ridding yourself of this electric intruder: I found time not only to read more books, but even to write one.
However, the general election has cured my tellyphobia. This is truly one of the great moments in the history of the medium. In a sense, the leaders' debates may be reality TV. But if so, they vindicate the form, do they not? Here is a true live hustings, a moment that is old fashioned as well as modern – and revolutionary in its sudden injection of life into a dead system.
Why has it taken off? Britain has always had a special relationship with television: we produced, from the 1950s onwards, some of the best TV programmes, and because of the comparatively small size of Britain, and the regulation of channels, there was a special sense of television as a window on the nation, a communal village hall. That has been beautifully restored and reclaimed in this election.
Television can deliver something that I fear the digital age is not: a sense of the universal, of the public. Contemporary media often separates the public into special-interest communities – a knitting blog, a shed blog ... an art blog. What happened to the general reader, the general public, the general electorate?
But maybe it's time for Britain to re-enter the sitting room. I'm considering going back to that new-fangled machine everyone's talking about. Back to basics. Back to the box.
