The devils that made me a dandy

TELEVISION. WAY BACK IN THE 1950s AND 1960s, it was the little flickering black-and-white screen with its cutely rounded corners, that glossily veneered boxful of miracles, which had provided the source of my undoing: here were the very seeds of a subsequent and abiding addiction, dangled daily so very irresistibly before me, and with a beguiling artlessness, by the most sly and accomplished pusher imaginable.

Between the ages of eight (when I was sent to prep school) and thirteen (when the ante was upped and I was packed off with, among much other lumber, stiff collars, indoor shoes, and a Sunday suit — all alive with Cash’s woven name tapes — to a boarding establishment in the middle of Oxfordshire) the blandishments of television had me by the throat.

There was simply nothing else vying for my concentrated attention — because although I have, in one way or another, spent the whole of my life thoroughly immersed in the world of books, I did not grow up in a bookish household: I remember a dictionary, a Pears Cyclopedia, the four pastel coloured telephone directories, and very little else.

I knew nothing of the children’s classics, and I don’t think I had so much as ever laid eyes upon a poem. (not to say , and ) collectively formed my literature of choice, though these were soon supplanted by Anthony Buckeridge’s quite wonderful books, and then