Going up to the Protter's place in Downie Combe before 1962 was great fun. There was football in the yard, table tennis, sparring matches with real boxing gloves, and general larking around! Then - in the twinkling of an eye - it all changed. And the eye that twinkled was to be found in the corner of the Protters' sitting-room. Everything changed the moment the Protters got one! And this was not just a Protter phenomenon. Whole swathes of the country changed the moment people got one! The hunger for getting one seemed to get completely out of control. One day time itself willhave to be re-designated anew. Instead of BC or BCE (Before the Common Era)
BTV (Before TeleVision) will become a new parameter of time, and ATV (After TeleVision) will send Anno Domini and ACE packing.
The triumph of the 'great indoors' in the 1960s was not a pretty sight. Curtains started to be drawn at five o'clock on bright Summer days. (This was code for "Keep Away! - We Prefer Our Goggle Box's Company To Yours!".) If your luck is in and you gain admittance into the darkened inner sanctum the Glazed Eyes of the Newly Dead will not offer any welcome. You will be tol to remain mute, and if this rule is broken a rush of shushes and hisses will make it clear that you have overstayed your 'welcome'. When you take your leave and bid a fond farewell to your dlightful hosts their leaden eyelids will barely register the sweet sorrow of your tip-toed departure.
By 1962 the "when are you getting one?" question had winged its way into every street in the land. Soon nine of of ten ATV households would be spending night after night surfing along on the Big Wave of Electronic Change. For a brief while a small band of rebels on Prefab Estate Island pledged to stay in their BTV wireless lifeboats. This was ditched overboard as soon as a critical mass of Newtin Road prefabs had gone out and got one. The slick salesman in the corner prefab had amazed everyone by going out and getting one back in 1954! 'Tubby' Lard's 'dark horse' family was not all that far behind. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic suddenly stopped quoting his favourite line from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty about refusing "to bow the knee" to convention and could barely hide his joy when he told his next door neighbour that "he was getting one." The phrase "Did you listen to...?" was hardly heard anymore, even if The Goons (going strong since 1950) had been on the night before. Those without one feel like disenfranchised serfs washed up from the Middle Ages.
The "when are you going to get one?" question was never going to go away. It would prowl around the woods in the middle of the night, paces back and forth up the fron path at mid-day, poke its shiny screened dot-filled face through front windows of wireless only sitting rooms, and give out blasts of phoney synthetic pseudo-laughter and ecstatic audience applause from inside the coalhouses of TV-less households. One one occasion it prodded its long silver aerial up our letter-box. Wireless-only households could see that they were completely surrounded. They knew that the atmosphere of intimidation would never let up. The Big Question Of The Day
would follow your bus home and leap out of the rent man's and milkman's and postman's lips. It was whispered in the barber's shop if no other customers were there. It might have been possible to evade it back in 1955 - but there was no evading it now. Even the birds circling above the prefab roofs were starting to screech it out: "When the heck are you going to get one!"