Daily Mail, 20.8.12
There are four virtually abandoned contraptions of plastic and metal gathering dust around our house. There’s one on my desk, another in the kitchen, a third in the sitting room and a fourth by our bed. We used to call them telephones, but now they are better known as landlines, and they are remarkable only in that they hardly ever ring.
Actually that’s not quite true. Young men and women with Indian accents, who introduce themselves as Sally or Craig, call four or five times a week, usually wondering whether we’ve ever been mis-sold something called a PPI.
As we’ve been heroically diddled by a bank in the past, I suspect we have, but I don’t need an unlikely Craig or Sally from Bangalore to investigate the errors of our ways or tell me about dishonest banking practices. So whenever I now hear the familiar satellite hum and am asked if I am Mr Connolly I simply reply: “No. I’m afraid Mr Connolly is in jail,” which puts paid to any further conversation.
Of course I’m not in jail, I’m in hiding from cold-calling nuisances, and sitting here reminiscing about the great days of the landline telephone, that window of time before the entire developed world embraced the mobile and its successor the smartphone, and before email and texting replaced the spoken word.
I’m not saying such development is bad. Far from it, as I do my work almost totally through email. And if it means that more people are now using the written word to communicate, thus confounding the jeremiahs who’ve been telling us that children of tomorrow wouldn’t learn to write if they all had phones in their pockets, it certainly has a plus side.
But not many technological advances come without the odd regret. And with the continuing decline in the use of the landline, with over 85% of the adult population now owning a mobile, and some people having more than one, an era has almost gone for good.
Today a mobile is considered an absolute necessity for every adult, while a majority of secondary school children have one. But I’m old enough to remember the days when relatively few people even had a phone in their family home, when it was something big and black that sat in the doctor’s surgery telling you how important a man he was.
A sturdy, moulded piece of Bakelite, with the bit you talked into being tethered to the moonfaced, clockwork dialling part, and that in turn seemingly chained by a wire flex to the wall, it was a heavy piece of equipment. Pity the poor burglar who got coshed by one of those telephone receivers – as I used to imagine they did in Agatha Christie mysteries.
We didn’t have a phone in our house until, I think, 1961 when I was twenty, so if any calls had to be made it meant either cycling to my mother’s dress shop which was over a mile away, or taking four heavy old pennies to the red telephone box near the bus stop.
It would seem an awful chore now, especially on a wet November night. But making those first teenage calls, with the ritual of the pennies being pushed into the slot, tremulous fingers carefully dialling the number, then the clanging of copper alloy on steel with the pressing of Button A when the receiver at the other end was picked up, was almost always exciting. You didn’t make a phone call lightly in those days. There had to be some good reason.
Later, as a student, receiving a letter from the right person was thrilling. But being able to speak to her long distance, imagining her sitting in the chill of her parents’ hall, because even those who had phones always seemed to put them in the coldest place in the house, was supreme. And, oh, the pain when the pips began and there was no more change to put in the box.
Not that romance governed everyone’s early telephone experiences. Richard Branson has often told how, when starting out as a teenage record entrepreneur and living in an unconnected Notting Hill flat, he would take up semi-permanent residence in the phone box outside his window and use it as his office, requesting that customers called him there.
If it were possible to find such a thing as a handy phone box these days, anyone monopolising it, or even waiting outside for a call at a pre-arranged time as some of uonce did, would probably be arrested on suspicion of being either a drug dealer or a terrorist.
Today when our smartphones come with cameras, FM radio, maps, music and TV attached, as well as apps for novel reading, games, shopping, train timetables, news and football results, it’s possible to forget those simpler times when the phone had but one function, and that a relationship could be quickly built between caller and telephone operator.
Telephone companies still employ operators in call centres as a last resort when all recorded services have been exhausted. They’re usually functional and polite. But back then there was a mystery and romance about the person in the job – the faceless Samaritan who would make the connection for you.
Chuck Berry even gave the directory enquiry operator a main, if listening, role, in one of his most famous songs – Memphis, Tennessee.
“Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee, help me find the party trying to get in touch with me,” he sang taking the part of the father, desperate to get the number of his six year old daughter, Marie, who is now living with her mother from whom he is separated.
Almost every famous rock band of the Sixties used to perform it. But could the same poignant song be written today in a world of increasingly disposable mobiles, and easy, almost universal communication? It’s difficult to imagine.
Nor are songs the only part of the popular arts to have changed with the digital revolution. For something like seventy years the good old landline played an important role in thousands of movies, with love stories being built around missed calls. Remember now she’s just walked out of the door when he phones her – heartbreak ensues…
Then there were the thrillers. We’ve all seen those moments when late at night the terrified heroine, alone in the house and usually in a semi-diaphanous nightie, picks up the phone to call the police and realises that it’s dead. The line has been cut. The psychopathic killer is already inside the house. And he’s coming for her…
Wireless technology has pretty well wrecked all that. People communicate with each other all the time now, if only by text. They keep in touch permanently, phones very rarely out of some hands.
How many times can a hero realise too late that he’s out of wireless range or the battery in his mobile has gone inconveniently flat? None, I would say, after its overuse in the Danish TV worldwide hit The Killing. Screenwriters will have to devise new ways to stretch the suspense and keep the plot plausible. It was so much easier when Alfred Hitchcock was making Dial M For Murder.
Life is obviously easier now as we use our smart phones to pay bills, check the weather forecast and text or email those to whom we need to impart information. But it somehow feels less friendly. Like everybody else, I used to use the telephone to chat to pals, but for some reason my shiny, clever little smartphones have always discouraged that. I don’t know why, but they do. Now I rarely even use my landline.
In fact knowing that I’m saving time for everyone when I email or text and that I get more work done that way, I’ve begun to feel as though I’m intruding into another person’s private space when I occasionally consider making an old fashioned friendly phone call just for the fun of it.
So here I sit and consider the shining state-of-the-art telephone on my desk that so rarely rings and which I so rarely pick up to call anyone. Who could possibly have predicted that the 21st century digital explosion would have condemned what was once a shared centre of the family as it sat out there in the cold of the hall by the stairs on top of the telephone directory?
Or that in this age of communication overload we’d now spend more time writing to our friends and relatives by way of emails and texts than we do speaking to them?
Still, there is a bright side. It looks as if the use of emails has saved the art of letter writing for another generation.
