agitations were of course not so much for ourselves, for we were all comfortably enough off—that is to say we could afford a bottle of wine every now and then and very few of us rose with the dawn and laboured until nightfall—but sprang from a burning sense of general injustice or a generalized sense of burning injustice, whichever quote’s the best or whichever your readers prefer. Gladly we gave our hearts and minds to others. We were the intellectuals of the revolution: our function to rally and inspire the workers. At my suggestion Bernard tried rallying and inspiring the college support staff—the groundsmen and the cleaners and the canteen ladies—but they weren’t interested. They wanted to get home to watch telly. In Darcy’s Utopia there will be no television.
Q: In that case I imagine people will flee Darcy’s Utopia in droves. Don’t you?
A: No, actually, I don’t. I believe if you took a referendum today a majority would agree that television should be stopped forthwith. Present them with a vision of a world in which meals were eaten at a table instead of on the knees before the flickering screen; in which conversation was commonplace; political and social ideas worked out by individuals, not spoon-fed into the mind by paid commentators; a TV-less world in which we danced and sang and played charades to entertain ourselves or even popped round to the neighbours; in which our children were not fed visions of death and dead bodies on the daily news, their infant imaginations no longer turned feverish and fearful by the sobs and sorrows of the bereaved; nor subject to the cruel, disagreeable and frequently morbid fictional fantasies of others—would we not really vote for this? Are we not well enough aware that on the screen, as on the page, good news is no news? Where is the drama in easy times, good times? Where is the benefit in not raping when rape is on the cards, not killing when killing can be done? Inasmuch as “good” television is confrontational, violent, full of event—why then, I think most people would agree, on reflection, yes, communally, we could do very well without TV. We certainly don’t want to do without it if others have it, for fear of what we might be missing, but if we all gave it up—Mr Vansitart, because the human race has invented TV doesn’t mean we have to put up with it.
Q: But surely people need to know what’s going on?
A: I suppose we could have one news bulletin a month, by which time what was important and what was not would have become apparent. And the occasional newsflash, I daresay, should a swarm of killer bees approach, or a hurricane, or a radioactive cloud, might well be useful. But the race to be first with the news which so obsesses journalists is quite pointless—a childish game they play at the behest of their capitalist masters: to be there first! Why? Who cares? In Darcy’s Utopia we will make do with listening to the radio. Hearing voices in our heads, we must work to make our own pictures. Hereby our imaginations will be educated and stimulated, not grievously curtailed and made afraid.
They sat in a fashionable Italian restaurant in the city. At nearby tables people nudged one another and whispered ‘Eleanor Darcy’. There had been a month or so where her face had been seen almost daily on TV: they had not yet quite forgotten. She changed seats with Hugo so that she sat with her back to the other diners. She had told him that Brenda was obsessively vegetarian, and that she longed for red meat: would he take her out? It was her idea, in other words, not his.
Q: You don’t imagine the TV industry would take kindly to its abolition?
A: Oh, we don’t have to be quite so drastic. Let them make programmes for each other. They do it anyway. Just let them not transmit them. I’ll have the lemon sole.
Q: But I thought you wanted meat?
A: Only in theory; when it comes to it. Faced with the actuality of change, one avoids it. One likes what one knows, and knows what one likes. Now when I was with Julian, my second husband, I was a great meat eater. Julian was fond of steaks: we got through jars of mustard. While I was with him I even developed a liking for steak tartar. Bernard was a pork and beans man, with a