I have recently been watching an awful lot of daytime television. Not by choice, you understand. My father has been staying with us and TV has featured prominently. I had optimistically thought that I would read a book, serene and undisturbed, while all of this was going on in the background. But, predictably, that isn’t what happened.
What did happen is that I got sucked into every programme, regardless of my determination not to. Daytime television is not the cosy place that I’d always imagined it to be. For one thing the news seems to be on every 5 minutes and after a day of this I found myself on high alert, poised and ready to combat the next disaster. I now understand how people become survivalists – or preppers, which is the term I prefer. It makes them sound like American preppies, like Ryan O’Neal in ‘Love Story’. I like to imagine them stockpiling deck shoes and chinos. It’s a much more appealing image than people zealously hoarding pasta and bottled water in a cave in case the end of the world arrives.
My favourite programmes are the ones involving vintage, antique and generally old objects, which may be because I have a vested interest in preserving items that are (arguably) past their prime. I am fascinated to see the things that people have kept for years, often for generations. It’s like a glimpse into the past. Sometimes it’s just because they’ve never got around to getting rid of them, but often these things have been cherished and appreciated. And it’s always fun when lots go to auction and are found to be worth a fortune. But my very favourite is the programme where they visit old barns and cellars and unearth things that look like old tat and then re-purpose them to look like new tat. Ancient hubcaps are turned into clocks, and rusty water tanks transformed into tables. The results are enormously satisfying and perfectly in tune with our increasingly fashionable make-do-and-mend approach to life. Greta would approve.
As I expected, there is a constant diet of property programmes, but among the people buying rundown houses at auction and those wanting to reinvent themselves by buying a house overlooking a duck pond or, failing that, in Australia, there is a sinister strain of shows about heartless landlords and feckless tenants. Filth, greed, squalor, laziness, incompetence, misfortune and poverty are graphically laid bare for people’s home entertainment. I thought things couldn’t get more dismal until a programme came on featuring an English presenter acting as a US prison guard for a day. It left me pining for wholesome news reports on flooding and the coronavirus. Which brings me back to preppers – I’ll just nip off and check on my supply of deck shoes.