Broaden your horizons
The seafront at Aberystwyth, courtesy of Marc Pell @blinky264
Back in the day, when I was a scruffy Aberystwyth undergraduate, I regularly used to make the undignified dash from my student house at one end of the high street (not High Street, strangely, this was a residential street a couple of minutes away) to the Drama department at the other end.
To get there, you had to pass a branch of Dixons (R.I.P.) where dozens of televisions sat in the window showing you the same thing and the same thing was some new-fangled channel called Sky News.
I was reminded of this when I found out that one of my lecturers from all that time ago - Dame Elan Closs Stephens* - has been appointed acting Chair of the BBC. Her predecessor, Richard Sharp, is leaving later this month after some poor judgement about his relationship with Boris Johnson. It’s not a particularly exclusive club so at least he’ll have lots of people to talk to if they set up a support group.
Anyway, I’ll always remember something Elan told us in one of our Theory of Television lectures. This was when people were beginning to jump at the chance to watch more than four channels by signing up to alternatives like 24-hour news on a loop, seemingly endless programmes about shark attacks on Animal Planet and hours and hours of WW2 on The History Channel.
‘It’s called broadcasting, not narrowcasting.’
She told us it was the duty of those making the programmes to make sure it appealed to as wide a range of viewers as possible so that there would be something for everyone and everyone could come along. That was broadcasting.
Narrowcasting meant catering for a very specific set of people and encouraging them to split themselves off to watch only what they already knew they liked. It may not have been good for the viewer’s soul to break away from everyone else like that, but it seemed harmless enough.
Now, of course, we know the consequences of closing yourself off, reading, watching and listening only to those who already share your interests. Back then, all we had to fear was your mum spending too much time re-watching ancient episodes of Corrie and The Bill on UK Gold.
The other, less serious problem with narrowcasting is that you split yourself off from the chance of stumbling across an unexpected pleasure. If you let your streaming service pick out everything you watch, you just get the same old same old. If you only ever listen to Spotify playlists, you might miss out on hearing that song that was playing on the seafront café’s radio that time you stayed up all night to watch the sun rise. You know, the one you’d forgotten you liked so much?
Narrowcasting keeps us in our lane while broadcasting lets us be more open to something new, something good, the unexpected pleasure. Serendipity. Kismet. The possibility of a Sliding Doors moment.
Which brings me to what I’ve been watching and reading.
Sliding Doors
A film so classic, they named the concept of a split-second decision that changes your life after it. When Gwyneth Paltrow misses the tube train, it could mean the difference between life and death, a foxy blonde crop and an unconvincing long brown wig, the gangster boss in Blue Lights and the scientist from the beginning of The Last of Us.
In any case, if you haven’t yet seen this 1990s classic with Gwyneth Paltrow acting, not Gooping, you should. If you have, it’s the film’s silver anniversary this year and doesn’t that make you feel old?
Weak Teeth, by Lynsey May
Copy of Weak Teeth by Lynsey May and a pair of sunglasses
This is a wonderfully funny Edinburgh-set book about Ellis, whose boyfriend has just kicked her out and who has to return to the bosom of her ordinary/extraordinary family just as her long-widowed mother has found herself her a much younger boyfriend.
It’s not exactly out of my comfort zone. In fact, it’s very much my usual kind of thing but I don’t just love this book for that. I also love the way I found it, not by having it algorithmically given to me or by reading about it in a newspaper or online but simply by coming across it on the shelf of an independent bookshop that I hardly ever visit.
This book and I were meant to meet and perhaps you are meant to meet it too!
STOP PRESS!
As I was finishing up writing this blog post, my editor has returned my draft of Book 2 with notes. Hopefully, good updates about this next time!
* She wasn’t a Dame when I knew her. I’ve never knowingly met a DBE. Does it count if you met them before they were honoured. I overheard some lads talking about if they’d ever ‘done it with anyone whose had a boob job’. One of them said the woman had the op after they’d slept together and did that count. The general feeling was ‘no, it didn’t’.