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. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll 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. <\/p>\n
All that changed on a recent trip across the Irish Sea. Four of us made the jaunt to Nottingham<\/a> to see Lily Allen<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s ex-husband bought for other women, or how unfair we thought the two-star review<\/a> 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t 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 \u2013 we were about to be greeted by a 100-inch television. My brain couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t get the door open fast enough. <\/p>\n Okay, so a 100-inch television is just \u2026 quite a large television. It\u2019s not the size of a cinema screen. It\u2019s 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 Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s Homecoming concert film and Harry Styles Live in Manchester. <\/p>\n