Almost nobody watches anything together any more, and the sports bar is the only room left where a hundred people react at once
BOX Piccadilly holds a 4.4 from two hundred and seventy-nine people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and it is a sports bar with a very large number of screens.
And it is one of the last rooms in Britain where a hundred people look at the same thing at the same time and react.
What we have lost
The shared broadcast.
There were three television channels in this country until 1982. Which meant that on any given evening, a very substantial proportion of the entire population was watching the same programme, at the same moment, and would talk about it the next day.
Twenty-eight million people watched the last episode of a sitcom in 1979. Thirty million watched a wedding.
Those numbers are gone and they are not coming back. The audience has been atomised – into channels, then into streaming, then into phones – and the last common experience has almost entirely dissolved.
Except sport
Which is the exception, and it is the only one.
Sport cannot be recorded and watched later, because the result will reach you first – and that single technical fact has preserved live, simultaneous, communal viewing in a way that nothing else has managed.
You have to watch it now. Everybody has to watch it now. And therefore everybody is watching it now.
The Prat’s cultural desk regards the inability to avoid a football score as the last remaining guarantor of shared national experience and notes that it is holding up an entire industry on its own.
Why the room matters
Because watching alone is not the same activity.
A goal, watched at home, is a small private event. A goal, watched in a room with a hundred people who all want the same thing, produces a physical reaction – the noise, the standing up, the strangers grabbing each other – that has no equivalent anywhere else in modern British life.
It is one of the very few occasions on which adults in this country touch people they have not met.
And we wrote at Albert’s Schloss about the long bench, and about how the beer hall is the only venue type in five postcodes that deliberately forces strangers to sit together.
The sports bar does the same thing, with a screen instead of a table.
The screens
Which are the whole overhead, and which nobody thinks about.
A commercial sports licence is one of the largest fixed costs a British pub carries. It runs to many thousands of pounds a year, and it is the reason a great many pubs cannot show the football and a great many others cannot afford not to.
Verdict
Good bar, decent food, and one of the last rooms in Britain where everybody is looking at the same thing.
Why the pub got the football
Because of pricing, and it was deliberate.
When the broadcasters took top-flight football behind a subscription in the 1990s, a great many people could not afford it – and the pub could, because it could spread the cost across a hundred customers.
Which meant that watching football in a pub stopped being a choice and became, for a very large number of people, the only option.
And it changed the British pub permanently. The screens went up. The layout changed to face them. And a room that had been arranged for conversation was rearranged, within a decade, to face a wall.
Nobody decided this. A broadcaster set a price.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My dad said people should read this before voting. He’s right but naive.