"When I got a telly we had no aerial, but I discovered that if I or one of the children stood by it you could get a picture. So I had to make a statue that could stand by the telly"
About this Quote
Domestic deprivation becomes a minor surrealist set piece in Bainbridge's hands: a family huddled around a new television that can only be coaxed into life by a human body acting as antenna. The punchline - "So I had to make a statue" - lands with her signature deadpan, turning need into ingenuity and ingenuity into absurdity. It's funny because it's so practical. It's also funny because it's faintly monstrous: the modern miracle machine requires a person to be immobilized beside it, domesticated into furniture.
The subtext is class without sermonizing. A "telly" without an aerial signals a particular postwar British reality: aspiration arriving faster than infrastructure, consumer goods edging in ahead of comfort. Bainbridge doesn't romanticize poverty; she shows its quiet humiliations and the improvisations it demands. The children become part of the circuitry. Leisure isn't free time; it's a workaround.
There's also an implicit portrait of motherhood and labor. The "I had to" is the giveaway: she's the one tasked with solving the problem, turning the household's desire (a working picture) into an object that will do the standing-in. A statue is a comic solution, but it reads like an emblem of the domestic role itself - expected to be present, steady, and silent, holding the signal together.
As context, Bainbridge's novels often mine memory for these sharply observed humiliations, where the banal becomes gothic. Here, technology doesn't liberate; it imposes new rituals. The image is pure Bainbridge: grim, economical, and just strange enough to feel true.
The subtext is class without sermonizing. A "telly" without an aerial signals a particular postwar British reality: aspiration arriving faster than infrastructure, consumer goods edging in ahead of comfort. Bainbridge doesn't romanticize poverty; she shows its quiet humiliations and the improvisations it demands. The children become part of the circuitry. Leisure isn't free time; it's a workaround.
There's also an implicit portrait of motherhood and labor. The "I had to" is the giveaway: she's the one tasked with solving the problem, turning the household's desire (a working picture) into an object that will do the standing-in. A statue is a comic solution, but it reads like an emblem of the domestic role itself - expected to be present, steady, and silent, holding the signal together.
As context, Bainbridge's novels often mine memory for these sharply observed humiliations, where the banal becomes gothic. Here, technology doesn't liberate; it imposes new rituals. The image is pure Bainbridge: grim, economical, and just strange enough to feel true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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