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In British "New Wave" films of the 1960s such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) and A Kind of Loving (Tony Richardson, 1962), television is a classic "bad object," associated with commercialism, consumerism, lack of authenticity, and the destruction of both family life and traditional working-class communal values.1 This television, clearly gendered as it shrieks and chatters in the corner, is uncomfortably squeezed into cramped working-class living rooms, but is shown to inspire desires and behavior that will transform these living spaces. In that often rather revealing party game, if this television was a person, it would be a bottle-blonde, commodity-obsessed housewife, one of the many feminized embodiments of mass culture in a history that reaches at least as far back as novel readers. However, this figure, although brash and slightly vulgar, with more than a hint of the American, at least had modernity and the future on her side, even if she must be repudiated by the virile young men who are the heroes of these fictions.
Forty years later, in the North London-set About a Boy (Chris and Paul Weitz, 2002), television again figures as both a maker and a marker of identity. However, now the hero Will (Hugh Grant) lives in an apartment furnished in leather and chrome and organized spatially around the new entertainment technologies. Far from being crammed in, the screen structures the living space and is itself controlled through a selection of remote control devices. For Will, domestic media technology offers choice and enables him to structure his days and to pass the time. He is strongly invested in the construction of identity through the consumption and possession of cool artifacts, be they gadgets or shoes, CDs or movies. However, not all of Will's acquaintances inhabit the same black-andchrome media landscape, and he is unfortunate enough to become involved with a woman who doesn't have "cable or satellite or DVD," and so the couple are stuck on the sofa with an endless made-for-TV movie on broadcast terrestrial television. Broadcast (network) television, what you watch when you have no choice, is inextricably linked here with excessive emotion, domesticity, needy women, being trapped. A final shot from this relationship sums it up as the couple sit watching television...