Last week, for reasons that I can’t be bothered to explain, my dad was
pottering around in the cellar of an old church. He called me up on his
mobile phone. “For reasons that I can’t be bothered to explain,” he began,
“I’m pottering around in the cellar of an old church. And I’ve found a
knackered old film projector. Do you want it?”
He’s not an antiques dealer or a member of Time Team. I think he was merely
doing a vicar a favour and clearing out some junk. The film projector was
heading for the skip and between us we saved it.
He knows I love old stuff like this. Don’t get me wrong: I love new sleek
stuff as well such as the iPod Touch and Sky+ and the new Posh Spice-thin
Apple laptop that I can’t possibly justify buying. But there’s something
nice and reassuring about old clunky things as well.
You know, old dusty things that give you a warm, comforting feeling inside,
such as pinhole cameras, 1950s radios and Angela Lansbury. They’re just,
well, better somehow. Need evidence? Look no further than Terminator 2. Yes,
the T-1000 may well have been made of a mimetic polyalloy and been able to
turn his arms into liquid metal spikes, but in the end Arnie, the old
clanking version with the tin legs and the sunglasses, saved the day. Don’t
write old technology off, is all I’m saying.
At home I’ve got an old reel-to-reel tape machine, several old film cameras, a
big scratchy old gramophone, a radiogram with a spindle for stacking records
on, a few old valve radios and a curious object, apparently a precursor to
sat nav, that I’m told used to be referred to as a “map”. I’m not the only
one who likes it all, either – eBay is full of electrickery from the days
when you still had to put your own plug on.
Of course, there’s always an exception to any rule. In this case the
exception’s name is Mike. Mike is a friend of mine with whom I shared a
house when we were students. He had (still has) a penchant for old gadgets
such as mechanical lawnmowers and big rusty tools and industrial mincers. It
all came to a head one day when he returned from a boot fair with an
enormous, manually operated, hand-cranked Banda copier, the forerunner of
the Xerox machine.
I had a feeling it was haunted. It took three of us to manhandle it upstairs
to his room, where he intended to “get it working again”. A week later he’d
given up and single-handedly tried to get it back downstairs and into a
neighbour’s skip. As he tipped it to get it round a corner, a torrent of
1950s Quink poured out of it and cascaded down the stairs. The carpet, along
with our student deposits, was history. So Mike tried the only thing he
could think of. He tried to clean it up with petrol.
I can only assume he was genuinely, properly mad. Of course, it didn’t work so
for the next two months until the end of term we lived in a house full of
ink and petrol where nobody dared even turn on a light switch let alone any
kind of electrically powered gadget.
All of this goes some way to introducing the fact, recently reported, that
34,700 people in the UK still have black-and-white TVs, steadfastly refusing
to upgrade and clinging to their old sets.
Yes, they’re bulky and have a fuzzy picture and would often get so hot that
they would set fire to people’s curtains, but to those 34,700 people who
laugh in the face of progress and have willingly taken a brave stand against
the rise of the machines: I salute you all.
Jon Holmes is a writer and comedian who presents his BBC 6 Music radio show
on Saturdays from 2-4pm
