Now if you are of a certain age you will remember those black and white photographs of urban roof tops covered in TV aerials.
Often they were accompanied by those condescending comments about the television age, or goggle box land.
And at the heart of such observations was that TV was an inferior form of entertainment which is about as elitist as you can get.
Anyone who watched the Granada documentaries of the 1960s or Play for Today on the BBC along with much other fine drama and current affairs programmes can testify that the two terrestrial channels did more than just offer up a new a “opiate for the working class.”
Today of course television has come of age and while there is much I don’t watch it is an accessible and at times thought provoking medium.
That said I couldn’t resist Andy’s picture of Hartington Street off Claremont Road, which in its way is as much a comment on the way television has gone as those forests of aerials from the 1950s.
From one channel to hundreds and along the way from black and white to colour and satellite providers who enable you not only to select what you personally want to watch but get “catch up” as well as roaming the planet’s entire television output.
But I suspect Andy’s picture of “Satellite Street” is already on the cusp of being the past for increasingly many of us are now watching via a computer, and in the process moving ever further along the channel of individual and personal viewing.
So I shall leave you the question of how soon will his picture rank alongside those black and white photographs of urban roof tops covered in TV aerials as a quaint anachronism?
Picture; Hartington Street, 2014, from the collection of Andy Robertson
And at the heart of such observations was that TV was an inferior form of entertainment which is about as elitist as you can get.
Anyone who watched the Granada documentaries of the 1960s or Play for Today on the BBC along with much other fine drama and current affairs programmes can testify that the two terrestrial channels did more than just offer up a new a “opiate for the working class.”
Today of course television has come of age and while there is much I don’t watch it is an accessible and at times thought provoking medium.
That said I couldn’t resist Andy’s picture of Hartington Street off Claremont Road, which in its way is as much a comment on the way television has gone as those forests of aerials from the 1950s.
From one channel to hundreds and along the way from black and white to colour and satellite providers who enable you not only to select what you personally want to watch but get “catch up” as well as roaming the planet’s entire television output.
But I suspect Andy’s picture of “Satellite Street” is already on the cusp of being the past for increasingly many of us are now watching via a computer, and in the process moving ever further along the channel of individual and personal viewing.
So I shall leave you the question of how soon will his picture rank alongside those black and white photographs of urban roof tops covered in TV aerials as a quaint anachronism?
Picture; Hartington Street, 2014, from the collection of Andy Robertson
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