I am not much of a fan of people who say, with that familiar hint of snobbery, "I never watch television". Nor am I sure that I always believe them. But for several years when I was juggling work and young children I did struggle to find the time to fit TV into my routine. And although I was aware that I was missing out, I would smugly console myself with the fact that I was, at least, reading, and could opine on Dickens and Dostoevsky when asked (which I never was).
When one did slump in front of the gogglebox, it was always with a sense of guilt. And when the prodigious Christmas telly binge came round, that sense of indulging a vice was worse than ever.
![<i>Game of Thrones</i>: a modern-day version of classic literature?](/web/20161229092950im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/f/p/q/2/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtimty.png/1482974576487.jpg)
No longer. In this golden age of television drama, not only is it unacceptable to be snobby about watching TV, it is no longer necessary to feel guilty either. The showy pile of books by the bed has been replaced by box sets loaded up on the digital recorder. Nobody is interested in whether you have read War and Peace, but you will have a rapt audience if you can describe the highly charged emotion of Paul Dano as Pierre Bezukhov eating a potato in Andrew Davies's television adaptation.
High-quality original television shows have been compared to great novels for some time now. Five years ago Salman Rushdie announced that TV drama was the new literature, citing the beautifully crafted narrative and characterisation in series such as The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men. Since then, shows such as Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones have been praised for their literary qualities. And most recently, The Crown has redefined historical drama on television with an intelligence and sensitivity (and budget) hitherto unseen.
These new televisual aspirations have even stolen a form of deceit familiar from books. I used to be ashamed of some of the gaps in my reading. Now I have to paper over the holes in my televisual education. I do not know how it happened, but I confess that somehow I missed out on The Killing. In fact, I had seen no Nordic Noir at all (which is now akin to not having heard of Ibsen) until I recently started watching Modus. Today that's a cultural crime in itself.
I had not watched a single episode of Game of Thrones until finally, unable to bear it, I began at season six, with my daughter pausing the first episode every two minutes to explain who each character was (a not dissimilar experience to having someone tell you the entire plot of The Iliad up to Book 22).
I may have read Crime and Punishment, but somehow House of Cards passed me by. It is on my list, of course, but every time I think I might have time to work on that, a new and exciting series emerges. Those of you who have not seen Stranger Things or Westworld must be feeling desperately out of the loop.
I have not stopped reading and I still have the occasional conversation about books. But even in my book club we often end up talking about a particularly good television show. There I shall continue to pretend to be a telly intellectual. Just as long, that is, as no one discovers that I have never seen Twin Peaks, Downton Abbey or Homeland. These days the bluffer with cultural pretensions must lie not about how little TV she watches, but how much.
Telegraph, London
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