Curse that black hole of doom

Have you seen the meme where an ageing filter is applied and some young person, now in gran drag, tells their prospective grandchildren about their favourite song when they were young? Inevitably, the song is some expletive-laden paean to hard-core drug use and pornographic sexual encounters, with a powerful defence of the thug life built in for good measure.

You laugh because it’s incongruous. Should this granny really be rapping all the lyrics to Jay-Z and UGK’s Big Pimpin’ so effortlessly? It makes a fleeting point about the sea change in media and how we consume it, and then, before you have really considered what it all means, you have doomed-scrolled to the next meme and the next, until your phone sends you a panicked notification that your frontal lobe is now potentially leaking from your ears and that maybe, just a suggestion, mind you, you should consider closing the app and giving it a break.

The story I might tell my grandchildren will strike them as even more ludicrous than me breaking into the anthemic “We doin’ big pimpin’, we spendin’ cheese … on B-L-A-Ds” (which, incidentally, will be my choice in the event of such musical questions arising in my dotage).

“Sit down, my little chickens and let me tell you a story — hard to believe but true — when I was but a wee thing, we used to wait for the TV to start. Put that in your vape and smoke it, little children. Yes, indeed. Uh huh.” Cue chirps of shock and horror! I remember anticipating this grand development — the onset of afternoon scheduled programming — with trepidation, watching the test pattern with increasing frustration and then, when the countdown started with that blue clock ticking down, running in a frenzy of mad excitement around the garden and the house, praising the dark overlords of the SABC with shrieks of joy. “TV time, TV time, oh, yes, it’s TV time.”

In retrospect, it strikes me that this infernal box was custom built for mass addiction. We quite innocently brought these big, square melamine things into our homes, gave them pride of place in every lounge and sitting room across the known universe, and settled down in front of them in our huddled masses for our daily dose of opium. The La-Z-Boy era of maximum vegetation was upon us. Eating around a table? Anathema. The TV dinner was shovelled abstractedly down our throats while watching other families make jokes and life-changing decisions in short, digestible episodes with regular ad breaks substituting for family time.

And now we live in peak streaming, where the TV is the primary piece of furniture, placed flush against your open-plan sitting-room wall so it can be watched from everywhere in the home at all times, in a long, uninterrupted series of unfortunate events, as you binge your content, at the mercy of the screens in your life. Developers don’t even bother anymore with space for that old antiquity, the dining-room table.

I hate the sight of a TV screen — it’s a real problem for the crack addiction. How to integrate all that black negative space into a wall with paintings and rooms populated with objects that give the impression of a life lived in three dimensions in the present tense? Some TV companies give you a screen saver that pretends to be a painting. But it feels wrong. I mean, it is all just for show anyway: the minute you press the button the world around you vanishes and you are sucked into these parallel, fully formed universes. Why bother with actual stuff — a mattress on the floor will do just as well. But I persist in the illusion that I have control. As opposed to just a hand-held control. To this end, I put my last known TV in the cocktail cabinet. Ironic, that!

Try explaining that sterling reasoning at the Media Addicts Anonymous meeting. I called up Joe Paine (the designer) and said, “I just love your cocktail cabinet [it’s called the Kelly Capwell] and instead of filling it with a known addictive substance of the liquid variety, with an actual warning on the label, I would like you to put my TV inside it, so I can pretend I don’t have a problem.” They call this putting lipstick on a pig. Very pretty lipstick — the cabinet is a round, sandblasted miracle of good design. But you know what they say about squarish pegs in round holes? It all worked beautifully for a while. Out of sight and all that. But I am sorry to report that I have had to call Joe up again and ask him to restore the cocktail cabinet to its original purpose — a marvellous, slightly alien-looking repository for libations.

I have graduated to a new solution to my problem. The Samsung projector. This is not a shameless plug for Samsung but, my god, have they worked me out! I can now pretend that I am entirely addiction free, as I no longer possess a black hole of doom. Instead, I have the world’s niftiest projector — sleek, smart, and infinitely portable. Inside it is every single thing ever and I can fill the entire wall with the screen. Lately, I have been watching it all on my ceiling as I lie on the floor on that aforementioned mattress. If you are seeking me, you will find me in the middle of season three — I can’t quite remember what it’s called, but you will love it.

• From the August edition of Wanted, 2024.