Less is more…

There’s a famous Monty Python sketch featuring a group of rich Yorkshire men. Having risen from humble beginnings, they look back to their days of poverty. “Aye we were poor, but we were ‘appy,” says one. “We were ‘appy because we were poor,” says another.

Lately I’ve come to see that poverty – or let’s call it want of choice – might not be a bad thing. Let me explain…

One night last week, after a long day’s toil at the coalface, I thought I’d sit back and watch a movie. First I tried Netflix. I began to browse… loads of great films, but nothing caught my fancy. Ferris Bueller? No thanks, can’t abide him. Jackie Brown, Life of Brian… how to decide? You could be ten minutes into one and then be thinking you should have gone for the other, Taxi Driver or Escape from Alcatraz…

After twenty minutes I exited Netflix. Next came BBC iPlayer. More great movies: Brooklyn, yes, I enjoyed it, ditto Stan & Ollie. A phrase from our political arena came to mind, “talks about talks”. It was heard a lot in the late nineties when they were trying to get the two main parties into the same room… (What progress we’ve made!)

Talks about talks were preliminaries before the main event could take place. And my trawling through scads of movies was also a preliminary exercise to go through before getting down to actually watching something. Unfortunately, that night it didn’t happen. All the browsing made me drowsy.

I began to dream of those long gone days of analogue television in the late sixties and seventies, when there were only three channels to choose from and just one television for each household.

Back then television brought families together. There were certain programmes that we watched religiously every week, year in year out. Just to hear the signature tune of Sportsnight with Coleman or The High Chaparral caused a stir of excitement.

The High Chaparral was a western drama series that ran from 1967 to 1971. It was on BBC2 on Monday nights at 8pm. It was about the Cannon family who owned a large ranch near Tucson, Arizona. After a while our family began to bond with the characters on screen. Big John was the patriarch of the Cannon family, just as my father John was our patriarch.

I was Monolito, Niall was Uncle Buck, Conor was Blue Boy and Mum was John’s wife Victoria (albeit she never watched the show!).

We knew the actors only by the names of the characters they played. When Henry Darrow (Monolito) died last year, I posted a picture and a wee paragraph on Facebook. There was quite a response. “Oh, yes, I remember watching Monolito with my family. Happy times” was a typical comment.

There’s a lot to be said for such shared experiences. They create bonds within a family and give a sense of belonging and community. Nowadays we are all so fragmented, away off getting lost in our own ‘hopeless little screens’, to quote Leonard Cohen.

Human beings are social animals. That’s how we thrive, in relationships with other people. So much of modern technology causes us to isolate. For many, a smartphone is their closest companion, which is not very smart.

One of my favourite movies is In the Name of the Father. If it’s on television I will usually watch it. But if I see that it’s on Netflix or Amazon, it doesn’t hold the same attraction.

I think it’s because when it’s on television, while watching it, I’ll be part of the wider community of TV viewers, even if I’m alone in my living room. When I can access it any time on Netflix, I may have the power to watch the film whenever I like but somehow the experience of watching it as an isolated individual is less satisfying.

One of my fondest memories is going to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in Newtownstewart cinema with my father in the mid 1970s.

“I can’t give you seats together,” said the woman at the ticket window. “That’s okay,” said pops, “We don’t want to hold hands.” The cinema was packed, but there was a great atmosphere produced by the audience giving rapt attention to a great movie.

It’s hard to get that today because we are even fragmented within ourselves. Recently I was watching The Office Christmas special when I paused it to watch an entirely unrelated video on YouTube while scrolling on my phone. I’m sure my enjoyment of The Office was not enhanced by my inability to give it my full attention.

Some films became like old friends. There was a sense of excitement when you knew they were coming on. Shenandoah with James Stewart, The Great Escape or The Magnificent Seven.

A line from Boys Town, with Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, became part of our family folklore. The priest famously said that he had never met a bad boy, whereupon my dad said to me, “But he never met a boy like you” implying that if Fr Flanagan had met me, he could not have made such a declaration.

Yes, there was a lot of fun watching TV back then. But as the Yorkshire man says, “Try telling that to the young people today and they won’t believe you.”