One thing led to another this week, and I spent some time with my mum. She spends her days doing four things, to all of which she brings great intensity. She cooks, she cleans, she reads and she watches television. She watches a lot of television. She knows what she likes and when it’s on. Her viewing schedule is organised with the same rigour she applies to cleaning out my kitchen drawers. Listings are scrutinised at the weekend and plans are drawn up. What she can’t watch at the time of broadcast, she records. I’ve pleaded with her, over and again, to engage with the streaming services – nowt fancy, just BBC iPlayer, ITVX and so on – but to no avail. The schedule is the schedule and her schedule must fit around that. Bring streaming into it, and the paralysis of choice is too much for her. It’s probably a bit too much for all of us.
Her viewing day begins after lunch, perhaps limbering up with a bit of Countdown. Thereafter, most shows seem to involve couples trying to buy properties in sunny places, with varying degrees of success. At 5pm comes The Chase on ITV, one of several quizshows the evening brings. To justify her somewhat excessive admiration for my intellect, I can’t help barking out correct answers. But as we make our way through Mastermind and University Challenge, my right answers give way to wrong answers, which give way to no answers at all. Exhausting.
I doze my way through the nature programmes. They’re very good and everything, but just too soothing for their own good. I drift off during one about Asia and awake during one about Scotland. And then things get strange, with our attention turning to BBC Four and a 1974 episode of Call My Bluff. Robert Robinson in the chair, Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell the team captains. I hadn’t seen this since, well, 1974. All of this trio, of course, long ago joined the great majority. And, watching on the sofa with my mum, it all gets a bit elegiac. In an episode shown last week, I was pleased to see an incredibly young Robert Powell, along with a startlingly attractive young woman who I didn’t recognise. I rewound to find out this was Hilary Tindall, introduced as an actor then appearing in the TV series The Brothers. Whatever happened to her? A short Wikipedia page broke it to me that the poor woman died of bowel cancer at the age of 54. What must it be like for her children to chance upon seeing her like this?
The nostalgia kept on coming, with a quite brilliant episode of Porridge. Richard Beckinsale – “Didn’t he die young?” asked my mum. Yes, he did (a heart attack at 31). Age never withered him. I looked up Ronnie Barker and was staggered to see he died nearly 20 years ago. Mum announced that coming up next was As Time Goes By. She can say that again. It too was wonderful, but the melancholy was getting overwhelming. Everything was a worry. That young man with a small part as a waiter? Did his acting career work out? And who’s this playing Dame Judi’s daughter? She’s good. I check Wikipedia, with some trepidation. Moira Brooker. Phew, her entry starts in the present tense.
An hour of this had worn me out. No more, please. So, while I give my mum some stick about the amount of time she seems to spend watching Gregg Wallace, I was as pleased to see him as she was when MasterChef: The Professionals came on. And we were on the home straight. Just time for a bit of the news and for her to say something disobliging about the presidential candidate Donald Trump before turning in. The next morning, it fell to me to break it to her that he’d won. She cursed. But whatever. Another day had dawned. The countdown to Countdown had begun.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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