I suppose everybody acquires a few bad habits when they retire. Add into the mix your own version of lockdown and I suppose it’s a question of what, not if. In our case I admitted in my previous retirement blog to having added a couple more glasses of wine per day. But there’s a darker secret vice we’ve developed.
From what I read everybody is watching a little more television, Netflix, Amazon whatever your cup of tea might be. We are no exception. I wouldn’t say we’ve ever been really big TV watchers but now I suspect we can no longer pretend that this is the case.
Who would have thought a couple of years ago that we’d be watching TV at about 3 o’clock. I’m almost ashamed to write it. Mostly a little later but there have been times recently when the one-eyed monster has sparked up and it hasn’t even been sport we’ve been watching. Watching sport on TV is not subject to the usual rules of civilised behaviour.
We now watch on average about three hours TV a day. Bear in mind we’re heading for the bedroom, and the OK activity of reading, about 7ish so that’s the size of the lockdown gap to be filled.
The good news is that at least part of that period is watching educational documentaries. In the last few days we’ve watched South Bank Show (as above) programmes about Cold War Steve, a fascinating artist who uses Photoshop to create some very powerful images (look him up). I was sold when he referred to one of his influences as another of my distant heroes, the collage maker John Heartfield who used actual paper collages to make hard-hitting anti-Nazi, anti-facist, political points in Germany (1930 -1938) with Hitler in power, talented and brave. I used similar techniques while at art-college and although Leeds was pretty wild in the 60s, Nazi German it wasn’t. I looked for examples from my own work but there were none worthy of inclusion in this blog.
We also watched programmes about Benjamin Clementine, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, Lucian Freud, Bruneschellis (his dome), Degas, even The Trip until the two of them became insufferable. Throw in Alice Roberts’s History of (so far) Lincoln, London, Portsmouth and Plymouth. Excellent. Along with this there have been plenty of music programmes – Blues, Country, Laurel Canyon and Jazz – and that’s a nice combination of education and entertainment. Not to mention a clear conscience.
Unfortunately there’s a more indulgent side to our watching. Mostly in the form of Babylon Berlin, Alienist, Stranger Things and Young Offenders. These have no educationally redeeming features unless, like me, you’re interested in Weimar Berlin in subtitles but that’s not much of an excuse is it. Also rubbishy films (Client Eastwood and Tom Cruise).
At least no Strictly, Bake Off or Downton Abbey but maybe just a bit too much of Transatlantic Sessions but then that’s educational if I play along to them. I need to compensate for a lack of live music in lockdown somehow.
When I look at this list I sometimes wonder why I spent all the time, effort and grant money (sorry current day students to mention ‘free education’ although, as this is a retirement blog, you’re unlikely to see it, that said your parents or grandparents who are probably paying for you, might see it, so sorry to you) I did acquiring an education. One tries to rise above the common people, the hoi polloi, one’s background, me from a pit village and Mrs Summerhouse from her council estate and here we are watching hours of tripe. But that’s retirement in the days of Covid for you.
I blame our children. They set us up with Sky box. I don’t know what we did before we had it for our viewing. Watched endless repeats of Salvage Hunters and old Sherlock Holmes movies, as I recall. So on that basis we’ve not moved on much, other than several episode of The South Bank Show. Is this acceptable in these challenging times? Who the heck knows? Ask me in a years’ time surely things will be back to normal then. But not to Salvage Hunters. Those days are gone forever, aren’t they?