Linear Thinking: In Praise of Broadcast Television
And a controversial opinion regarding the moral superiority of no adverts
I remember the first time I heard the words “linear television.” Back in my days as a very serious tech and telecoms reporter, a smooth-talking lobbyist (I mean, what other kind are there) was explaining something to me about the finer points of spectrum allocation. He was also rather handsome. My attention wandered for a moment (respectfully) and I noticed the wedding band, further proof that the rarest commodity in Brussels was single, straight men.
By the time I was focused again, we were talking about linear television. “What’s linear television?” I blurted out, partly because I had started thinking about all the weddings I was going to that summer, while still having no glimmer of hope that I might settle down one day myself, but also because I didn’t know what he meant.
“Well, Frances,” he said (lobbyists, like estate agents and MPs, absolutely have to say your name every five minutes to remind you how much you matter), “it’s broadcast television going out on a channel, or what we think of as normal TV – but give it a few years and the right regulatory environment, and on-demand TV will take over.” And do you know what? He was right.
My children think nothing of flicking through several pages of streaming menus to find what they want. In their world, at the ripe old age of five, it is completely natural that they should be able to watch the Numberblocks episode ‘Land of the Giants’ again and again, on repeat. I try to tell them about the BBC Broom Cupboard, about consulting the schedule in a paper copy of the Radio Times, and about the fleeting nature of time, but I realise I make as much sense as my own parents did when they showed me 78rpm records on my grandma’s chest freezer-sized wireless.
Streaming services are just normal now. Having made the Gen Xers reading feel old, let’s do the same for the millennials; do you remember when on-demand was new? When TiVo or Sky OnDemand was a massive flex? Think back to the days of the Gordon Brown government, when staying in the pub and saying “it’s OK, I’ll watch Peep Show later, I’ve got a set-top box” was up there with owning an iPhone or buying a house as a huge post-graduation “I am making money, honey” milestone.
Man, we are old now. Anyway, the point of this is that Old Mother Time here thinks that linear TV is a good thing. I will outline five reasons why this is the case, and then next week we can compare the relative merits of CBeebies’ morning “Get Set Go” segment and Channel 5’s Milkshake! I have had several years to form some nuanced, sensitive opinions on that topic… but let’s start with why linear TV rules OK.
Removal of choice
Fairy stories abound with moral lessons about how too much choice spoils us. The frogs and their king, Beauty’s sisters in the OG version of La Belle et la Bête… just as I’m not letting the girls learn to use a spinning wheel any time soon, it’s quite nice to remove a choice from the table. Somebody wants Paw Patrol, someone else wants Mira, Royal Detective… We are going to put Tiny POP on while you decide. (Once you’ve put it on everyone forgets they were picking a show anyway).
There’s a clock in the corner
We’ve already touched on how great this is. When I was a child, there was no TV in the mornings, because there was only grown-ups TV. Well, that ship has sailed, but if it does have to be on (spoiler alert: it does, how else will you get everyone to look in the same direction for long enough to plait all that hair) then you might as well have a tiny clock in the corner. You can’t get stuck in a loop watching Gabby’s Dollhouse and lose track of time. If you’re like me and have an internal monologue that never switches off, you can even make up stupid rhymes. 8.29 – plenty of time! 8.38 – oh no we’ll be late!
You find new programmes to watch
Look, our lives are now determined by algorithms. The robots are far from infallible; I once went on a road trip round Romania and Bulgaria with my good friend Ben Goodwin and continued listening to Radio Vitosha when I came back. It didn’t take long for the algorithms to become profoundly confused about my nationality and start feeding me adverts to help pass my Life in the UK Test and job ads in Cyrillic script. Благодаря, internet!
But if there’s one thing algorithms are good at, it’s serving you more of the same. Express the slightest preference, and they’ll latch onto it and decide it’s the only thing you will ever love. If you are going through a dinosaur phase, streaming platforms show you more dinosaurs. Watch something with fairies, get more fairies. See one digger; more diggers. But now think how plastic children’s brains are, how open to new ideas. Why get them stuck in a rut? Broaden their horizons by letting CBeebies choose what comes next.
Critical thinking
I realise this one is a reach, but it does no-one any good to sit around in an echo chamber seeing all their favourite things all day. It just doesn’t. If you put on normal TV and get screams of “nooooo turn off Justin’s House” then you can at least have a discussion about why people don’t like it, and at least arrive at an informed opinion about what people do and don’t like. Tom Phillips, who has the infinite patience required to edit this newsletter, wrote an excellent book about conspiracy theories, which explains how important it is to be exposed to worldviews outside one’s own bubble. (Tom would like to point out that he didn’t write the previous sentence, although he is writing this one.)
The power of “No”
We’ll talk about the Reithian holy grail of zero adverts next week, but (here comes an opinion) I don’t actually think they’re that bad. Obviously children’s TV is like 90% toy adverts, and they all elicit cries of “I want it!” So then you can explain it’s too expensive, or a load of old tat, or simply a ruse to make you spend more money (collectable, the bane of my existence, says the woman with hundreds of My Little Ponies).
I have theory that if you can say “no” to things in a comfortable, familiar controlled environment, it softens the blow when you have to do it again in the toy aisle of Sainsbury’s. A kind of “pre-no,” if you will. As they say online, Your Mileage May Vary: you may keep your children away from both commercial television AND the toy shop, which is entirely up to you (really appreciate you subscribing for the writing, though!). Or you might find the requests for trips to Disneyland too much to bear. Either way, they are going to see a LOT of adverts in life, so I’m definitely on team “teach them to apply a healthy degree of scepticism now.”
In the process of writing this I’ve put Radio Vitosha on again, so I’m off to dance round the kitchen to Balkan electro-pop: tune in next week for the head-to-head children’s TV morning schedule clash of the titans.
Tom is tempted to add that the other great thing about linear kids TV is, of course, the links between shows, a formative part of childhood and – crucially – a source of Hall of Fame memes:
