Mark Fisher hated the idea of ‘box sets’ – sitting through your own carefully curated version of television, where you would watch only works of high quality, which you would then discuss with your circle, like Victorian gentlemen keeping up with the latest serialised novel. What he favoured was a model of television that was, perhaps perversely, both experimental and deeply centralised, which he imagined to have existed on BBC2 in the 1970s and Channel 4 in the 1980s and early 1990s, and even, occasionally, on BBC1 and ITV (again, whether it did exist is not really relevant). The model was a Dennis Potter serial that took Brecht, surrealism and class conflict into millions of private houses, or the moments on Top of the Pops when someone would crash into it, ‘storm the reality studio’ and be talked about in thousands of playgrounds the next day. A lot of the culture he would write about on his blog K-Punk was the last dregs of this mode of broadcasting where a sizeable proportion of the population would tune in all at once, and where people making a cup of tea in the advert break would cause power surges on the electrical grid – reality TV, asinine celebrity game shows and talent shows, football.

It isn’t because of Mark’s strictures that it took me until early 2020 to actually buy a subscription to a provider of television. I hadn’t had a TV licence from around 2004 until then, and hadn’t the need for one – why, when there’s the internet? And any television I’d watch would be on DVDs, either purchased or shared, watched in my own time, discussed on social networks (and, usually, it would be American TV). Like millions of others I finally buckled and bought a ‘smart’ television box at the start of the coronavirus lockdown. One effect of this is that I very quickly ended up watching a lot more television. Along with the ‘burner’ described in the first post, I’ve tried to have a regime where I don’t use the internet at the weekends and evenings – it being important to have a time where I don’t stare at a lit screen, and where the temptation of going onto the all-day discourse trap of Twitter is at a safe distance. The evenings and weekends would involve watching not films, not reading, but watching – what? Well, what has happened is a process of regression, where I’ve found myself consuming almost entirely the sort of culture that I would have watched as an 8-year-old or a 13-year-old, if I’d had access to an almost infinite archive.

What has that meant in practice? Mainly, avoiding anything to do with Britain (and to a lesser extent, the USA) and watching almost exclusively Japanese cartoons and Korean dramas, with anything that could possibly remind my partner and me of the things that are happening outside the confines of our block of flats absolutely avoided. Events in the United Kingdom in the last few years, coming to a horrifying head in the horrendously dirty December 2019 election, have been hard to take, especially if you have been politically active (as I have, in a small way). That this was followed with an astoundingly poor response to the pandemic was a further kick in the face. So, nothing to do but hide. And that hiding has been completely in East Asia, which may also be fucked up, but fucked up in a completely different way, thereby blocking the otherwise constant bad thoughts about the place where I live and the direction it’s going in. Like so much of the experience of ‘lockdown,’ it has been like being in a sensory deprivation tank, where the outside world is kept out as much as humanly possible, with the effect that you end up on a journey of introspection and infantilisation.

The Japanese programmes I have watched started with their new iterations on Netflix, obviously, but over the last few months have gradually ended up being on Youtube channels devoted to mecha animations from the early 1980s. The reason why I find these so endlessly watchable, these interchangeable episodes of giant robots, metallic cities, cheap animation, strange colours and lurid backdrops, is precisely because they were the material of my childhood – dubbed into English, simplified and given tacked-on morals as The Transformers, Voltron, Robotech (I’ll only watch the subtitled versions of these, though – it’s the image, not the text I want here). These made their way to British televisions via the US, where they were the direct result of Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of TV advertising, which meant that programmes could be made solely to sell toys – The Transformers were randomly chosen Japanese toys given ‘characters’ by comics writers employed by a toy manufacturer, which were then animated in Asia and subsequently full-spectrum marketed to western children, with no obvious join between the programme and the adverts for the toys that ran in between.

Watching this stuff now, every morning, I’m pulled back into a system that existed when I was 5 years old, in 1986: Japanese robots, animated in Korea, named, marketed and copyrighted in the USA, would appear in your terraced house or council flat in the form of moulded plastic toys made in Taiwan and Macau and delivered by container ships to the giant Toys-R-Us by Southampton docks, in my hometown. Because of this, I’ve started to realise that my childhood dreams were manufactured by Toei animation in the early 1980s, and that they came to me through the ministrations of Ronald Reagan. While Play for Today and The Singing Detective were being watched by the teenage Fisher, I was hooked on extended toy advertisements. The social democratic culture he was raised on has only ever existed for me as a tale told by someone else, with its evidence only being BFI DVDs and YouTube channels.