Growing Up in a House Where the TV Was Always On

I grew up in a house where the television always seemed to be on.

There were a lot of us at home: older siblings, a younger brother, my parents, and me somewhere in the middle of all of it. Looking back, that probably explains why so many of my memories are tied to screens. There was nearly always somebody watching something, playing something, recording something or arguing over what was going on next.

It also meant I grew up surrounded by things that technically belonged to somebody else’s generation.

My older brothers brought the 1980s into my 1990s childhood. Shows like The A-Team and Quantum Leap were around. So was Star Trek. Wrestling tapes appeared. Films I was too young to watch sat on shelves or came home from the video shop. Posters covered walls. Computers and other bits of technology seemed to come and go through the house.

I was a 90s kid, but a lot of what shaped my tastes came from before I was old enough to choose it myself.

Television as a family routine

Television wasn’t something we put on when there was nothing else to do. It was part of the rhythm of the house.

I remember having a curfew of around 9pm while older siblings could obviously stay up later. There was always the feeling that things continued after I had gone to bed.

Test cricket is one of those memories. My brother could be watching when I went to sleep and, from a child’s point of view at least, somehow still be watching when I got up again.

Then there was wrestling.

I remember waiting for my dad to come home so we could watch old wrestling together. There was a lot of WCW and older wrestling in the house. I don’t really remember WWF becoming a thing for me until around late 1998.

That sounds almost strange now because everything is available on demand. There is no waiting for somebody to come home, no tape that somebody else owns, and no need for the whole room to agree on what goes on the main television.

Back then, the limitations were part of the experience.

The video shop era

My brothers would go to Blockbuster or one of the local video shops and come back with films.

There would be Indian films, kung-fu films, Golden Harvest movies and all sorts of things that I discovered simply because somebody older than me had decided to rent them.

Some films were clearly not for me yet. I remember Alien being around, but I was too young to watch it.

That still mattered. The box was there. The artwork was there. Older people talked about the film. You could build up an entire idea of something long before you were finally allowed to see it.

VHS covers, posters and conversations were their own recommendation algorithm.

Sci-fi everywhere

Science fiction was another constant.

Star Trek, Quantum Leap, Stargate and Buffy all became part of the background of growing up. My family leaned much more towards Star Trek than Star Wars. I don’t really remember Star Wars being a major part of my early childhood. That came later, when I was in my teens.

For me, spaceships and time travel didn’t arrive through a carefully chosen box set. They were simply part of what was on in the house.

That probably explains a lot about what I still like now.

Even the names I give computers in my homelab have ended up coming from science fiction. Decades later, those old influences are still there.

Technology was just part of the furniture

We had a lot of technology around the house for the time.

I remember an Amstrad from the 1990s, although the exact model has disappeared into the fog that comes with trying to reconstruct childhood technology decades later. There were computers, televisions, satellite boxes and piles of VHS tapes.

The televisions themselves didn’t exactly live easy lives either. I remember TVs failing more than once.

None of this felt particularly remarkable at the time. It was just home.

Now, when I look at my own house full of computers, servers, Raspberry Pis, network equipment and screens, I can see the connection much more clearly.

I didn’t suddenly become interested in technology as an adult. I grew up around it.

Before algorithms chose everything

The biggest difference between then and now might be how things reached us.

I didn’t have an app studying what I had watched and presenting a perfectly tuned row of recommendations.

I watched things because my brothers liked them. Because my dad had put something on. Because somebody rented a VHS. Because a channel happened to show it. Because there was only one television available and that was what everyone else was watching.

That lack of choice gave me a much wider and stranger mixture of influences than I probably would have selected for myself.

Wrestling sat next to Star Trek. Indian cinema sat next to Hong Kong action movies. American 80s television was mixed with whatever was currently on British television. Later, anime would join all of it.

And eventually the internet changed the rules completely.

That is probably the next part of the story.