The child sits cross-legged, shoulders dappled with light, a look of glazed vacancy on her face like a renaissance cherub gazing in wonder at the Almighty. This child is not, I should add, my own, but a subject of photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor’s new series, Screen Time.
Screen Time comprises dozens of beautifully shot images of kids at their most composed and otherworldly, ie, while they’re watching TV. No screen is ever shown, and the focus is solely on the studied, even beatific, concentration of its square-eyed subjects.
With the drifting of their imagination,’ Harris-Taylor writes,’their bodies are left in a kind of unselfconscious tranquillity.’ This is the nicest description I’ve ever read of that implacable TV-trance all parents will recognise. Moreover, glancing through the gallery makes me feel better about my children’s viewing habits, elevating their increasingly frequent bouts of box-goggling to little acts of meditation and repose or, even, performance art. I have, of course, sent it to every parent I know.
It’s nice to regard my son’s abyssal gazing as something like religious contemplation. It’s a comparison that’s unmistakable as he watches, zombified, his current favourite show, Dr Binocs. In this, the titular PhD – a floating beard with binoculars for eyes – presents short cartoons that answer questions like What If You Could Fly? Why Do We Fart? Could Loch Ness Monster Be Real?
The tone of the channel can be grating, but the content is admirably wide for a children’s YouTube channel. Sometimes puzzlingly so. It is, in fact, difficult to gauge the age range at which it’s aimed. Among the usual segments on dinosaur extinctions, planets, and bodily functions, you’ll find more on phytoplankton, schizophrenia and the life and times of Messi, Roger Federer and Genghis Khan. One video, What Is Recession? lays out a dazzlingly detailed explainer on interest rates and investment yields, all with the same chintzy flash animation they use for videos about the chemical makeup of farts. It’s impressively, even bafflingly, thorough, albeit a little jarring to see the same characters I’d just seen running away from a Yeti now cast as factory workers crying because they’ve been laid off from their jobs.
My daughter’s favourite channel is, predictably for anyone who is currently in command of a pre-speech child, Ms Rachel, the kind, smiling educator who makes phenomenally popular content for early-years children. She speaks loudly and clearly, and says, ‘Good job’ after each command, with the earned presumption that a million unseen babies are following her every word. My daughter is most assuredly one of them. With no little embarrassment, I can confirm that some combination of Ms Rachel’s uncanny pleasance and persistent tone have achieved feats of speech and gesture in our child that we have not managed in weeks as parents. This simultaneously makes us feel better, and worse, about her burgeoning Ms Rachel addiction, but it is not a feeling we interrogate for too long.
She gestures to her blocks and says ‘bahbah’ for the first time. Her brother quizzes me on supply and demand. Then they resume their vigil, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, gazing in cherubic bliss, upon the face of the Almighty.
