getting ready to go

The continuing story of how I ended up a storyliner on A Top Soap...

I ask around. Nearly everyone feels I should make the leap from my comfort zone. People talk about Jimmy McGovern, Paul Abbott, Alan Bleasdale... A couple of people - my closest friends - do say 'But Steve, you don't like TV. You don't even have a TV.' But most people don't feel that not watching television is any impediment to success in the medium. And I get the impression that several people always thought my not having a TV was kind of an affectation anyway...

I swear that's not the case. The reason I don't have a Tv is not snobbery, it's a combination of ADD and laziness. I never have the patience to sit through a whole programme. I'm always wandering off to read or listen to music, or phoning people, or doodling. I can't concentrate on watching anything for more than ten minutes at a time. That's the ADD... and the laziness is that we moved house, the new house didn't have an aeriel and we couldn't be arsed to organise a new one. And these days you don't really need a telly. There's the iplayer and if something's really good you buy the boxset for xmas and spend the whole of January watching it.

The really interesting thing is that our kids aren't bothered about TV either.

I never watched much Tv growing either. My Dad had complicated rules about what could or couldn't be watched. These boiled down to things he liked - good. Things he didn't - not only bad but forbidden. These rules extended to times when he wasn't even in the house. And my Dad's taste meant we couldn't watch anything American, anything violent, anything ecessively maudlin. We also couldn't watch gameshows, or Top of the Pops. A few things were practically compulsory (Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads; Yes, Minister, Steptoe and Son; Dad's Army) but still this regime meant that 80% of everyday playground chat was mystifying to me. Starsky and who? The Generation What? The Sweeney is a police unit? What does it stand for?

One lingering consequence of this regime has meant that a lot of 90s and noughties television has meant little to me too. Life on Mars makes no sense if you didn't get The Sweeney, any panel show where comedians get an easy laughs imitating Mr T (basically all of them) is spoken in a foreign language.

Nevertheless despite this draconian domestic government even my dad never went so far as to ever suggest that we got rid of the telly. And I don't think we would have stood for it if he had. The masses in number 75 Curlew Crescent would have been provoked beyond endurance and surelyrevolted... but our kids don't seem to care.

No, the truth is even teenagers don't need TV now. And for them it's not just the iplayer and the DVD boxset. The also have msn messanger and Rome Total War. They have 24 hour talk and retail opportunities. They have their own arcades in their bedrooms. TV is the past... talking bollocks in hyperspace and endless wasting of aliens, that's the future...

Of course I should have taken the hint from this. If the kids aren't bothered about TV, then it's a dying thing and bound to go the way of county cricket and riding tandems. A marginal activity for the eccentric middle aged.

Here's something I notice in TV owning households. The TV is always on, but no-one is taking any notice. Certainly the kids aren't watching it. It chirrups away in the corner of every room like a cheerful but demented relative. Someone who is easily ignored. It's only the middle-aged who care about TV.

Which is, perhaps, why people thought it might be a good move for me.

Anyway, anyway... I askaround, tot up the responses, do a swot analysis, write lists of pros and cons. Think hard about it. And, after days and weeks of careful debate. I do the wrong thing. I take the job.

I phone Redford. 'That storyliner job? Is it still going?'

'Yeah. I guess.'

'Cool. I'll take it.'

Somewhere of course the descants of Carmen Burana were swelling ominously in the background. I wasn't listening.