Londoners Magazine

Good old telly. For us geeks, she’s everything we’ve ever needed. She’s an unconditional friend. A surrogate parent. A mysterious, flickering teacher. And, on cold, lonely nights, she’s even been a sweet, tender lover. You know what I mean. Don’t be embarrassed. TV doesn’t judge.

As the first batch of children born in the information age, most of us grew up utterly seduced by the tender caress of our small screen nanny. And she raised us well. Transformers taught us that there’s more to life than meets the eye. Sharky and George drove home the stark reality that organised crime is everywhere – above and below the waterline. Captain Planet instilled a deep respect of our environment, and informed us that, yes, “heart” is an element.

Yes, in those hazy days, geeks and non-geeks shared the same goal of curling up on the sofa on Saturday mornings, lapping up every scrap of children’s programming on offer. As a result, geeks didn’t even realise they were geeks. We were all just kids, united by the warm glow of our lovely black boxes o’ fun.

Then came adolescence. Football was in, cartoons were out. Everyone was too busy smoking behind the bins to play SNES any more. Even fucking Warhammer was out of vogue. “What kind of sick world is this?” thought the newly-named geeks, most of whom also had to endure the physical double whammy of face-scarring acne and embarrassingly hairless testicles.

But TV didn’t let us down. It encouraged us to shun the outside world, draw the curtains, and persuade our parents to get cable. It opened up a whole new world.

Suddenly there was Star Trek and Stargate, Dexter’s Lab and The Powerpuff Girls, Batman and X-Men. With cable, we could even get Japanese anime shows like Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing. That made us feel really superior. Buffy The Vampire Slayer even gave us hope that there was a special girl out there who could slay demons and was, like, a totally awesome kisser.

So, TV got us through the awkward years. Mostly by allowing us to entirely avoid humanity until we felt ready to face the world. And face it we did, eventually, armed with loads of pretentious opinions about Stephen Spielberg and, frankly, shamefully huge DVD collections. But at least our balls had dropped.