Armchair Nation

Product Description

Details: But what does your furniture point at?' asks the character Joey in the sitcom Friends on hearing an acquaintance has no TV. It's a good question: since its beginnings during WW2, television has assumed a central role in our houses & our lives, just as satellite dishes & aerials have become features of urban skylines. Television (or 'the idiot's lantern', depending on your feelings about it) has created controversy, brought coronations & World Cups into living rooms, allowed us access to 24hr news & media & provided a thousand conversation starters. As shows come & go in popularity, the history of television shows us how our society has changed. Armchair Nation reveals the fascinating, lyrical & sometimes surprising history of telly, from the first demonstration of television by John Logie Baird (in Selfridges) to the fear & excitement that greeted its arrival in households (some viewers worried it might control their thoughts), the controversies of Mary Whitehouse's ' Clean Up TV' campaign & what JG Ballard thought about Big Brother. Via trips down memory lane with Morecambe & Wise, Richard Dimbleby, David Frost, Blue Peter & Coronation Street, you can flick between fascinating nuggets from the strange side of TV: what happened after a chimpanzee called ' Fred J. Muggs' interrupted American footage of the Queen's wedding, & why aliens might be tuning in to The Benny Hill Show. As Alfred Hitchcock said: ' The invention of television can be compared to the introduction of indoor plumbing. Fundamentally it brought no change in the public's habits. It simply eliminated the necessity of leaving the house. Ideal For: This is a great for television enthusiasts.