Wetherspoons and the great TV takeover

Andrew Martin
Monday December 12, 2005
The Guardian

Ten years ago, I walked into a pretty good north London pub, and saw a newly installed and massive TV. A sombre-looking reporter was talking into an outside broadcast camera, saying something like: "We don't as yet know the seriousness of the situation ... All we can do at the moment is wait." I thought the third world war had started, until I read the subtitles rolling along the bottom of the screen: "Groin strain trouble for Shearer."

It was the start of the Sky Sports pub TV revolution. Pubs became like living rooms, with everyone watching TV, and feeling vaguely like a mug for most of the time. The 650 pubs of the Wetherspoon's chain were a rare site of resistance. The company chairman, Tim Martin, was influenced by "The Moon Under Water", an essay of 1946, in which George Orwell described a notional, ideal pub. Some of Orwell's stipulations were pretty marginal (he would prefer the barmaid to call him "dear" rather than "ducky"), but one of the primary requirements was that the pub would always be "quiet enough to talk ... the house possesses neither radio nor piano". Accordingly, Martin kept televisions out of his pubs while everyone else put them in. Until now.
As of this month, Wetherspoon's pubs are being fitted with TVs. Longer drinking hours have brought the change - it was thought in particular that people taking breakfast in the pubs, which now open at eight or nine in the morning, would like to watch TV as they did so. (For my part, I can see that a couple of pints at 8am might complement the bleakness of GMTV rather well, or better still, obliterate it entirely.)
Martin insists that the Orwellian template is being adhered to, as pub managers are supposed to keep the sound turned down. "I was in a pub run by another firm," he says, "and they had tennis on TV with the sound off. I thought: that's quite nice." But the truth is that the staple diet will be 24-hour rolling news, a form where subtitles have circumvented the volume control.
TV is a depressant, generating envy, anxiety and guilt far more frequently than it does pleasure. Certainly the clientele at my local Wetherspoon's looked uncharacteristically glum the other night, the first with the new screens. The usual conversations were on hold, and all eyes were on the box.
TVs are in so many public spaces now that we are being deprived of our right not to watch. The rationale lies in what that sick Vodafone advert calls "making the most of now". It's as though we're all in fear of meeting some hypermodern, ferociously clued-up individual who incredulously demands: "You mean to say it was a full 45 minutes before you realised that Shearer was experiencing groin-strain trouble?"


ENDS