A friend used to live across the road from a family with a preposterous television. It was a gargantuan object and, in the evenings, when it lit up the entire cul de sac it really felt like maybe it might be seen from space. I had images of the family squeezing around the edges of their huge telly as it dominated their sittingroom and perhaps wearing sunglasses to protect their eyes from flash blindness.
I’ve never been drawn to owning a big TV. The idea of a huge screen in a relatively small room brings on shudders of claustrophobia and overstimulation. If I want to be overstimulated by a moving image, I’ll go to the cinema like a normal person. I last purchased a television in 2020 and, at 32 inches, it has always felt just right.
All that changed on a recent trip across the Irish Sea. Four of us made the jaunt to Nottingham to see Lily Allen perform her recent album West End Girl in a semi-intimate theatre setting. One of our party had once lived in Nottingham and offered to book the accommodation using his local knowledge. We opted for two nights, to make a weekend of it, fully expecting that our trip to the city would forever be remembered as that time we got on a plane to see Lily Allen for 45 minutes.
How wrong we were! Yes, we saw Lily, thought she was wonderful, and agreed that the Ryanair journey had been worth it. However, the talk of the weekend was not the dress made from the receipts of items Allen’s ex-husband bought for other women, or how unfair we thought the two-star review The Guardian gave the show was. We touched on those things, of course, but they were overshadowed by an unexpected guest star: the giant telly in the Airbnb.
The listing had been extremely humble about the presence of the immense TV and somewhat distractingly featured numerous photos of an unremarkable air fryer in the kitchen. Such was the fuss over the air fryer that I threatened to forego clothes and toiletries and bring only frozen wedges in my hand luggage to make sufficient use of it.
It wasn’t until we were in the taxi on the way from the airport (East-Midlands. Lovely and small. Extremely short flight. 10/10, would visit again) that our Nottingham ace spotted a detail on his Airbnb app – we were about to be greeted by a 100-inch television. My brain couldn’t even comprehend how such a thing might exist outside an Imax cinema. As we pulled up outside an exceedingly modest terraced house, we puzzled about how such a device would even fit in the front door. We couldn’t get the door open fast enough.
Okay, so a 100-inch television is just … quite a large television. It’s not the size of a cinema screen. It’s about the size of a ping-pong table hung on a wall. Still, we gathered around, marvelling at its sprawl. The open-plan livingroom was big enough to host it, although we did push the couches back to avoid turning our eyeballs inside out. We stayed up into the wee hours, watching Beyoncé’s Homecoming concert film and Harry Styles Live in Manchester.
We reluctantly dragged ourselves away from Huge Telly to sleep but flocked back to it the following day, drawing the curtains against the promising sun. What could Nottingham offer that Huge Telly couldn’t? After the Lily Allen show we didn’t dither or bother with the pub. We had already decided to allow Huge Telly to show us The Martian, giddy at the thought of watching Matt Damon hurtle through space on such a scale.
To say my head has been turned is an understatement. I returned home to Dublin and threw a derisive look to my 32-incher, perched on its sad little table. I walked around my small apartment, trying to imagine Huge Telly installed there. Could I ever get far enough away from it to be able to take it all in? Or would it be like the time went to see Interstellar in the cinema and had to sit in the front row and worried I’d be crying down my back for the rest of my life?
[ ‘We banned television and screens for a month … that was four months ago’Opens in new window ]
Maybe my destiny is not to be a Huge Telly owner, but rather a Huge Telly tourist, insisting on giant screens as I travel the world, refusing to sightsee?
I’m sure Lily Allen would be horrified to hear that she was maybe not eclipsed but definitely matched by a giant TV. As for the air fryer, we never even turned it on.