CHAPTER 4

Television and Kids

The Beauty and Pain of TV

James Lileks

SHE’S FORGOTTEN VIDEOTAPES. The way the machine grabbed the plastic slab like an impatient clerk, swallowed it whole, groaned and whirred as the magnetic heads rose to lick the tape. The desultory, dentist-drill whine when the tape rewound. The thrill of fast-forwarding and landing just where you wanted; the agony of overshooting the scene. The miseries of unlabeled tapes with inscrutable contents. My child will never know the guilt a parent feels when they put a tape into the VCR to placate the kid for a while; you felt like you were shoving a cud of pre-chewed Lucky Charms—medicated with sedatives—down her throat.

But you had standards, at least. The tape must be educational. Busytown should buy you twenty-six minutes while you clean the house. You have watched it many times, and you have made your piece with anthropomorphic, bipedal cats and dogs whose existence seems oddly centered around explaining the alphabet and the numbers one through ten. You have learned not to think too much about Lowly Worm, a limbless creature in an Alpine hat who is nevertheless capable of operating heavy machinery and somehow seems to be the moral and ethical model for Busytown: selfless, industrial, cheerful.

“The author is attempting to rehabilitate the serpent, you know,” you say as you sweep teething-cookie crumbs into a dustpan. “Busytown is obviously a postlapsarian construct in which the symbol of Satan is now reimagined as helpful and self-sacrificing.”

Child slurps sippy-cup sauce and nods. Lowly is okay, but Oh boy here comes Bananas Gorilla! He’s funny. You have a problem with Bananas, an imbecilic simian who provides minor disruptions to Busytown’s social order. For one thing, he is identified by his favorite oral pleasure, which suggests he did not choose this sobriquet himself; it’s like finding out your college chums called you Cigarette Human when you weren’t around. In some episodes he speaks. In some he merely grunts. As a hominid, he is the most advanced creature in Busytown, but he spends his time in criminal pursuits, attempting to procure bananas. Yet he is beloved. They haven’t thought this through.

So no, not that tape. This one. The one the wife bought at the store. Super educational. Alphabet Magic or something. You pop it in the slot—grab, groan, whine—and it’s cheap computer graphics and a guy who looks like Andy Kaufman playing the emcee from Cabaret. He’s Alphabet Al. He sings “The Alphabet Song”—but it’s not the one that also does duty as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” They composed a new one. He over-enunciates. He mugs. When he gets to Q, you wonder if Q will be for “Quoits,” as it was when you were young. The new alphabet song is ingenious, in its own way; you will pick it out on the keyboard later.

You will sing it in the car, later.

You will find it on YouTube, years later, and show it to your daughter, triggering neurons in her almost-teen brain that were ready to consign that memory to cold storage. You will write a piece about Alphabet Al and get an e-mail from someone who knows the actor and sends a link to his punk-rock band. Fourteen years after you put in the tape, you will be driving somewhere with your daughter and for some reason the alphabet comes up, and you sing the Alphabet Al version and your daughter sings along. Fourteen years later.

Because of TV. Because of the wonderful, stupid, mass-market, infantile, corporate-loyalty-enhancing, inventive, banal, inspirational, lobotomizing box in the corner.

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It’s 2001. Daughter has revolved around the sun but once.

It was a time of Teletubbies.

Remember? Bouncy felt-fleshed creatures who ran around and giggled and ate a lot of toast, all under the watchful smile of a flaming baby’s head in the sky, until 1940s-style metal speakers emerged from the earth like Orwell’s ear trumpet and commanded the Tubbies to rest. Now and then, video entertainment would be displayed on the TV-shaped marks on their bellies, which is a damned inconvenient way to watch a show. Everything would be upside down. The programs shown on their abdominal displays were aimed at children with the mental acuity of cold porridge and seemed inscrutably British. For example: A lady tells stories about a crown. You look over at your child to see if she’s showing monarchical sympathies. We fought a war over that, and George Washington didn’t die so you could sit here and watch cloth-covered homunculi shove pro-Queen propaganda down your milk-pipe, kid.

“Crown, crown! Where aaaare you?” the lady sang, perhaps channeling centuries of peasants crying out for the king to intercede against the depredations of the nobles. As the lady told the story about the crown to a rapt audience of children, no doubt promised lots of jellied toad or whatever they eat over there, the crown appeared and floated up. The lady told the crown to behave; it did not. Ah: A parable for the dynamic tension between ruled and the ruler, perhaps.

“What a naughty, proud crown,” the lady said with toffish disapproval.

I mention this for two reasons. We had a Teletubbies tape, because it wasn’t on TV for some reason. This meant that the story of the Naughty, Proud Crown would be repeated daily until the phrase burrowed into our brains like a tick. I would find myself years later dealing with a balky household object like a stuck doorknob in need of oil and say, “What a naughty, proud crown,” under my breath. Fast-forward ten years, having a chat with Daughter about the TV of her youth. She had no memory of Teletubbies but had seen them on YouTube and judged them disturbing. I did a search, and the term “naughty proud crown” did not, to my relief, reveal a video of Prince Charles in satirical puppet form applying a riding crop to the buttocks of Camilla Parker-Bowles. No, the first hit was the Teletubbies video. Daughter remembered.

Fast-forward three years more. Daughter and I are sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Mom to come home for supper. I thought I heard her downstairs, coming in from the garage. “Mother, Mother, where aaaare you?” I sang.

Wife walks through the door and says, “Crown! Crown! Where aaaaare you?”

Mind you, my wife has never made any pop culture reference of any kind in a quarter century of marriage, and a callback like this stunned Daughter and me.

“What a naughty, proud wife,” I said.

“Ewww,” said Daughter.

Point is: Those very early TV memories were burned in for the parents, not the child. Because this was our first, our only; because we had just moved to the house of our dreams; because we watched TV with her to gauge her reaction and savor her smiles. And because shortly after we moved, the TV turned into something else, a horrible portal, a window you wanted to paint black.

I have the video of the day it all changed. Jasper Dog is on his back, whining and unnerved. Toddler Daughter in her yellow onesie is smiling up at me, holding a toy telephone that said, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” again and again. Sun on the floor, green leaves outside. On the TV, two tall gray towers ablaze.

In the weeks after 9/11, the nightly TV ration—a little Baby Mozart, a Teletubby show—was the only respite we got from the news. We sat on the sofa with novocained faces watching the naughty, proud crown and the happy goat and the baby-face sun in the sky, and it felt a little bit like watching Mickey Mouse cartoons projected on a bedsheet in a bomb shelter. I dreamed of Tinky-Winky doing the news in Peter Jennings’s place.

Daughter, of course, remembers none of it. But she remembers Olie.

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Here’s the deal with Olie. I can sing the theme, if you like:

Way up high, in the roly-poly sky?

There’s a little round planet with a really swell guy.

He’s Rolie Polie Olie;

he’s small and smart and round.

And in the world of curves and curls he’s the swellest guy around.

Howdy. (Howdy!)

Hooray. (Hooray!)

And in the world of curves and curls he’s the swellest guy around.

I found the show on Playhouse Disney, which was the main morning pacifier. I worked at the kitchen table, laptop plugged into the phone jack on the wall downloading all the horrors, and Toddler Daughter watched her Disney shows on the sofa a few yards away. As I read the news and blogged, she watched four shows, and since the TV was in my line of sight, I watched them, too.

Elmo first. Thomas the Tank Engine, which was either a parable of the relations between labor, capital, and the ruling class, all bound together in a system that literally required their interactions to proceed along preordained rails, or a show about self-aware trains. Dragon Tales, which was about friendly dragons. The big, strong, male dragon was a lummox; the girl dragon had two heads and was smarter than everyone else. Of course.

Then Olie. She took to this show like nothing else. It concerned a nuclear family of robots—Mom, Dad, Olie, his sister Zowie, and dog Spot. Occasional visits from Uncle Gizmo, who sported an enormous lacquered pompadour, drove a motorcycle, and sounded like Elvis. There was also Pappy, an elderly robot given to by-cracky coot talk, bedeviled by false teeth that sprang from his mouth and ran around the room of their own accord. It looked like it came from a Marvels of Tomorrow brochure from the 1939 World’s Fair, and the music was straight-up Little Rascals–style ’30s jazz. It was clever, sweet, funny, and the theme was the signal that the day had really begun. For Christmas the first year in the new house she got plush dolls of all the characters. Spot the dog got a special hug. She said his name. “SPAH.” She knew him before she saw him.

Eventually new shows came along; she was ten, and Olie was kid stuff. She remembered that she liked him a million years ago, though, so: fire up the Google one night when we’re sitting around the table talking, and laugh ourselves to tears over Polish versions of the opening credits.

“Remember Spookie Ookie?” I said.

“He kinda scared me. No, seriously, he did.”

And for good reason. The Halloween show on Rolie Polie Olie concerned a pumpkin-headed sprite with a malicious grin. When Daughter was young we concluded Halloween with the Spookie Ookie shows, sitting on the sofa, sifting through piles of candy. It was tradition, until it wasn’t. And then I sat on the sofa like a sad dad sack and watched them by myself, because, well, tradition.

There was also a Santa show (Clanky Claus) and an Easter show (Springy Chicken), but they never quite took the same way. The leering face of Spookie Ookie connected with something elemental, an unnerving truth that put the lie to parental reassurances.

Every kid knows there are monsters in the closet, after all, and wonders why Mom and Dad have to pretend there aren’t. They know. You can tell by their faces when they look at TV sometimes.

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A year ago she says there’s a show she likes and thinks I’ll get. “It’s called Gravity Falls. It’s just—you have to see it. I can’t explain, but it’s really cool.” And so it is: two smart teenage twins go to spend a summer at a town filled with X-Files–style mysteries. Every frame is embedded with things for the Internet obsessives; Greater Mysteries loom in the backstory. In one episode the twins are in a red room that has a zigzag pattern on the floor, and I pause and laugh.

“What?”

“Here.” I get out my phone and Google “red room Twin Peaks” and show her: “This is a reference to this.” Her eyes shine: secrets. That is so cool. I wonder if my friends got that. Bet not. I fire off a tweet about the Twin Peaks reference with the proper hashtag and use the Twitter handle for the show’s creator. We return to watching. When it’s done I check my tweet, and show her a message aimed at me, her dad:

That gum you like is coming back in style

It’s a reference to the dialogue spoken by the backward-talking little man in Twin Peaks. It’s from the creator of Gravity Falls.

This is the Most Amazing Moment Ever. This is the Coolest Thing. I can’t argue. It’s like watching Star Trek with my dad, hearing a reference to the USS Intrepid, watching Dad call Gene Roddenberry’s office to ask if he knew anyone who served on that ship, and getting a letter by registered mail the next day from Gene himself.

Except, of course, I never watched Star Trek with my dad. I watched game shows with my mother. She liked Let’s Make a Deal. My mom wasn’t a TV watcher, but she mentioned once that she thought Monty Hall would be the sort of man who was “fun at parties.” I think she had a sneaky crush on Monty. I think she imagined sparkling soirees where people stood around in nice clothes, sipping crème de menthe and laughing at the trim Canadian spinning quips. Some nights when Dad had his bowling league we watched Carol Burnett and laughed when Harvey broke up Tim, although sometimes the show—as she put it—“got a little raw.” (This meant there were innuendos.) We also watched Hawaii Five-O together now and then, and I think she liked Jack Lord, too. Imaginary parties with Jack and Monty trading quips in a suite in a Honolulu hotel, tropical breezes, gay laughter, no one’s smoking (everyone on my dad’s side smoked and she had to put out the ashtrays and the house reeked for a day and she had to empty a can of Glade), and it’s marvelous.

I was completely comfortable watching TV with my mom until suddenly it wasn’t cool anymore. So we didn’t make popcorn on the stove and put it in the old dented bowls and pour over melted butter, and we didn’t laugh at Harvey and Tim together. That was okay, right? Because I was doing other stuff, and your parents can always come up with stuff of their own. I mean, they’re grown-ups.

So you’re heading off to the Embers with your friend from speech and debate league, and you head downstairs to the furnished basement with its knotty pine and patterned linoleum and demoted living room furniture and three unloaded rifles on the wall. Heading out, back by ten. Your parents are in the recliners, like astronauts in chairs designed to deal with G-forces. Dad has The Remote: the Zenith Space Command. Fargo had four channels. He might push a button once an hour to see what was on, but in those days it was almost an act of civil disobedience to switch networks in the middle of the evening. You made your choice. You committed.

When I got home and found them in the same seats, sports news wrapping up on TV (the local sports personality on Channel 4 wore ’70s Herb Tarlek plaids that exploded on the screen in wild, blurry moirés), they would head upstairs, and I’d have the TV to myself. The weekend treats: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and then grainy black-and-white sci-fi. My stuff. Sign-off: The poem about the jet pilot who slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God, which suggested not enough oxygen was flowing to the mask. Flag. Station ID card. Indian. Static.

TV was a private thing now. It wasn’t something we shared anymore. Who in high school watches TV with their parents?

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“In my time, at the end of the night TV was over.” We’re driving somewhere, and I’ve settled into old-timer coot voice. My Pappy Polie voice. Daughter has heard this before.

Annnd you didn’t have color, I know, annnd you had to watch shows when they were on. I know.”

“Exactly. If you missed them, that was it. Maybe they’d be rerun in the summer. All TV in the summer was reruns. Except for the Hudson Brothers or something. Point is I’m used to having what I want to see available whenever I want to see it, and it doesn’t seem amazing to me anymore. I pity you. You grew up with this miracle.”

“Well, pardon me for being born in the twenty-first frickin’ century.” Mock outrage.

The argument began when we were talking about The Office, which we both loved. I watched it on the big TV. She watched it on her phone. I watched it on DVDs. She watched it streamed over the ether. All of her friends were bingeing on the show, and I would hear them chattering in the backseat as I picked them up from soccer. I’d advise them to watch the British version. Uncomfortable silence.

“I tried,” one of the friends had said. “It wasn’t the same.”

“It’s excruciating,” I said. “And it’s British.” Something went ping! in my head, and I smiled.

British humor. It’s the last summer home before I go to college. The local PBS station is running a British comedy show on Sunday nights. My father comes downstairs to get something from his desk, or return a VFW magazine to the bathroom, or possibly just have a few words before his son bolts from the family home, never to return. He watched a few minutes of the comedy show, and I’m sure I radiated spiky teen go-away waves, because he couldn’t possibly get this.

He sat down. Grabbed the handle of the La-Z-Boy and shifted into full-prone mode. And laughed and laughed and laughed. To my amazement. My father left school in the seventh grade. Built a business out of nothing, spent his days with oil and gas and grease, lost his sense of smell from the constant reek of petrochemicals, hadn’t read a book in years as far as I knew, and he’s giving himself a side-stitch laughing at Monty Python. It was British! It had … references! And he liked it?

We watched every Sunday that summer, and the most extraordinary thing happened: I shared Monty Python references with my father, and still do. A line here, a funny walk there. “Don’t mention the war!” he’ll say.

“Actually, Dad, that’s from Fawlty Towers.”

“Well, that was a good show, too.”

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Daughter gave up on TV a long time ago. She hasn’t watched a program as it happened for half a decade. She regards Mom as hopelessly recherché, since she watches network TV on the DVR, and even if Mom does find a Netflix show to stream, it’s like a 1929 Movietone newsreel about an old lady who wins a Charleston contest. When friends come over, they watch TV, but not like my generation did, slumped and passive. They rewind, freeze, mock, Instagram it, Snapchat a frame with a comment. They live in a media fugue, and there really isn’t anything called TV. There’s just video, and it’s everywhere. There is no sign-off. TV is never over. It is not some Orwellian monoculture blared from inescapable telescreens. In my time we rearranged our lives to fit TV’s schedule, and consulted the High Holy TV Guide to learn when we should take our places to receive the sermons. Kids today, they press Pause on their computer and pick up the show a day later on their phone.

The end result of ubiquitous access and near-infinite quantity? She watches a tenth of the TV I did at her age. Platforms and channels don’t matter. The words “new episode” matter. Watched when you want, where you want, how you want. Hence she may never know the terror of … the SPECIAL BULLETIN.

You’d be watching cartoons, or some sitcom, and suddenly the screen would cut to a card that said “SPECIAL BULLETIN.” “We interrupt this program….” Your heart hit the roof of your mouth so hard your eyes lost focus, because this meant only one thing: toe-to-toe Nu’klr combat with the Rooskies. Cut to the anchorman at a desk, chattering teletypes in the background—and then “Something-something Chou En-lai.” Or Nixon trouble. Or whatever. So long as it wasn’t Lakes of Flame Engulfing the World, you could tell your bladder to cinch it up and stand down.

I hope we never spend a week like 9/11, with the TV always on, the crawl dragging bad news from right to left. But we will. When you’re young you fear the world will end all at once. As you age you almost hope it does, at least for yourself: Better the thunderclap-kaboom that smotes you fast than the long, drooling decline. The last thing you want to be is the parent reduced to a parenthesis in a room with beeping machinery, your eyes searching for something familiar, your child holding your hand and remembering all the things you lost when your brain got upended like an Etch A Sketch.

It would be apt, though, a neat reversal. Parenthood’s beginning is a daily accumulation of details and rituals and songs and books you never forget. Children grow and stretch, rise and mature; their mind, sensing the sedimentary impediment of so many memories, compels them to forget. You remember Lowly Worm and Olie and Mister Noodle and Thomas and Dora and Blue and the rest, just as you remember everything else. They forget most of it, but buried away in their neurons are faces and songs, waiting for the key to turn in the lock.

Speaking of Olie: The department store in 2001 sold Christmas snowglobes with Olie, and his sister, and Spot. It comes out once a year and goes on a shelf for the holidays. I always give it a shake. The snow will settle and rest, of course. But for a while it swirls. I’m not bothered that one day Daughter will inherit it and pack it away. I hope she’ll give it a shake and make it come to life, and remember.

Howdy. (Howdy!) Hooray. (Hooray!)

The fireplace, the old dog, the sofa, the crayons, the warm home on a cold day, the chatter of the colorful box in the cor ner, spinning stories. Everyday life, safe and bright. A short, sweet song we shared.

With occasional pauses for commercials for those Blendy-Pens that let you draw rainbows. And no, I’m not ordering them.