For our first Moment (TM) – which since I’ve not done any specific process of trademarking, must mean TelevigionMark1 – I’ve chosen a show I couldn’t defend as great, or even good most of the time, but the experience of watching it was a seminal Televigion experience.
Some scene setting. The year is non-specific, but likely before 2000 as I still had a feeling that all computers might suddenly stop working. The setting is a Belgian holiday park called a Sun Park, and specifically a hotel in that park where we were not meant to be staying. We had been in a cabin for a week or so and due to head home, but the holiday gods smiled on us with an overexertion while sailing on a small man-made lake, a minor knee surgery and an extra week’s holiday, at the pleasure of the insurance company.
My memory tells me that I, as a young teenager, had a hotel room of my own. This is likely not true. But let’s not let facts get in the way of a Moment.
I do know for a fact that this room of mine had a small drinks fridge where I found a small packet of open caramel waffles. The type that today fly into people’s hands and then their stomachs at a Starbuck’s counter. I had never seen them before, but assumed they were as much mine as the bed or the toilet. They were not on the price list, and therefore must have been left by a prior Belgian. I enjoyed them quickly and innocently.
I didn’t consider any of the extortionate spirit miniatures or bottles of wine. I haven’t changed much.
As exciting as all of this is, it pales into insignificance next to the exceedingly ordinary cathode ray television with a handful of channels and a hum that I miss to this day. That was the only temporary possession I really cared about. The remote control is still my first port of call in any hotel, AirBnB or acquaintance’s house on first arriving.
When I turned it on after checking in, I was greeted by the oversaturated image of a lot of people talking in a rhythm that felt right, but couldn’t be less natural. I was watching Full House, a popular and unremarkable sitcom that ran (gently meandered) for almost a decade. But to my eyes, it was the best thing I had ever seen. It didn’t matter if I got the joke, there was a laugh track to guide me. And musical cues if it was sad.
It would appear to be culturally important in Belgium, not for its content, but for it’s teaching of English to children, as we heard from various people my parents later spoke to, because it was not dubbed in French or Flemish, but subtitled. A stroke of luck on my part.
Every day, for the extra week, I determined I had to be in my hotel room when it was on. I had to assume Belgium had a strict schedule of unimportant American repeats, and they did. There is a story that often gets told, of me losing my swimming shorts on the way back from the pool one day, falling out of my rolled up towel or somesuch. I now think, through the course of this reminiscence, that it was probably on purpose so that swimming didn’t get in the way of Full House.
On the last day, it wasn’t on and I was devastated. The people I’d come to ADORE (i.e. nearly know the names of) had left me. And I was leaving the hotel. Maybe that extra longing helped cement my infatuation.
This Moment lingered with me so strongly that, many years later, despite my better judgement (and contrary to my prestige TV snobbery) I bought Season 1 of Full House on DVD. I was on a US holiday, forcing my family to wait while I fully browsed the Entertainment shelves in whichever Best Buy or WalMart they’d mistakenly let me into. Despite knowing how generic and poor its reputation was, I had to own it. I was drawn to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched it, for fear it doesn’t live up to my Belgian transcendence.
I couldn’t resist watching the first episode of Fuller House (the Netflix sequel/reboot from 2016) when it arrived. Snobbery won out in the end and I gave up, but maybe someday I’ll allow myself to wallow in the original on those DVDs, and tell you how I feel.
My earliest memory is of The Golden Girls on TV, possibly not even understanding the words, but entranced by the rhythm. Did it imprint itself and its rhythms on me? Or was it merely the activation of my latent Televigual superpowers, the cathode gamma rays for my Hulk-dom?3
I have tried to write sitcoms in this vein, but my snob gets in the way. I’ll try to dig into that a bit more in the future too.
Please tell me your thoughts on Full House, 80s and 90s sitcoms, or things that bypass your snobbery!
FOOTNOTES
1 Though this makes it sound like a new member of the order of Televigion called Mark, I assure you everything is written by TelevigionJames2
2 Yes, this is a blog that does inessential footnotes.
3This experience is also the reason that Too Many Cooks speaks straight to the heart of me. The catchiest 80’s sitcom theme, plus rising menace and huge rewatch value (HE’S LITERALLY EVERYWHERE, WATCH IT AGAIN).
Televigion 