Don’t sit too close to the telly, it’ll ruin your eyesight.
This could have been a dead chair too, technically speaking, but dead chairs have their own vibe going on, the sense of abandonment that comes from no longer being able to support or sit up straight, whereas this has a different dynamic altogether. The dead television is dominating the dead chair which, truth be told, is doing a pretty good job to hold its own.
No, this is definitely dead television energy on display here, that sense of impotent fury at being switched off, unplugged and discarded. As the familiar warning above suggests, there was always something slightly malevolent about the telly, reflecting our ambivalence about the medium. Horror movies such as Poltergeist and Ring amplified this unease by connecting it with an evil spirit world – an easy leap to make because we were brought up on the idea that watching too much television or too closely was intrinsically ‘bad’ for us, without it ever being explained why.
Now that the tube has been replaced by the screen, new fears take hold, eg the virus, but that aura of malign influence can still be felt with abandoned tellies, their blank, glassy eyes reflecting back at us as if waiting to lure us in once more.
Hey, it’s just a dead old box – what is there to fear?
Discover all the dead televisions here, here and finally here.