Any holidays planned?

There isn’t much to watch on actual TV.

Actual television as opposed to online television.

Actual television is constructed around guides and newspapers and signals. If the signal is down, the images flounder. Real TV feels connected. Intimate. Somebody else is watching this at the same time as myself. We’re watching together, in television signal land. There’s a sense of community. It looks like a huge bowl. The bowl is shallow and filled with people sitting on couches. In the middle of the bowl is a giant TV screen that everyone is watching, from their separate couches. The light from the huge television floods everyone’s face with soft lighting. This is what I like to call:

The Actual Television Bowl

Last night, I was watching actual television.

It was careless, relaxed, a remote control flick in my empty living room. The curtains were drawn. I was thinking about something else. Then, a show.

Everyone who has an actual television is aware of this show. You’ve definitely seen short flashes of different episodes, even if you’ve never committed to a full half-hour segment. The hosts are young and groomed. Shiny. Vibrating with good cheer. The hosts’ wardrobe is holiday-casual, in the archaic sense. The woman wears a sundress and the man wears an open-necked shirt. This shirt is often paired with a cardigan thrown over shoulders. Yes, really. It fits nicely with loafers and bare legs. For both presenters. If these details aren’t plucking your memory, let’s talk about the contestants.

Except, they’re not contestants, in the traditional sense. There’s nothing to win here. In fact, there’s very little to gain, it would seem.

If people who go on an actual television show aren’t contestants, who are they?

The guests, the people, the audience, the nominees, the victims.

Whoever they may choose to be, under the transparent cloak of television exposure, these people follow a similar mould.

They are usually a couple, sometimes, friends.

As in life, I hear you cry.

They have evidently been told to wear something that aligns with the presenters garb of holiday-casual. Or, in this case, holiday-television. It’s about wearing what you would wear on holidays, in your ideal life. Television tries to be an accurate representation of ideal life. If, on real holidays, I might wear a comfortable t-shirt and shorts, on television-holidays: the shorts and t-shirt, plus subtle extras that suggest this is my ideal holiday.

Suitable extras: a layer of bright bottled tan, huge tropical earrings, straw fedora, new sandals that burn the feet with fresh plasticity, jewellery — specifically jewellery that looks like it was purchased on the ideal holiday itself, probably from a hidden boutique place, where all the prices are in startling local currency. Bangles. Sarong. Most importantly — a huge holiday grin, spread from ear to ear.

‘I’m on my ideal holiday’, the grin says.

These are the things you think about when you think about holidays. They suggest paradise, an oasis of boardwalk. Heat. Glamour.

This TV show circles around the concept that life is a holiday.

You could, the loafered presenter reasons, be abroad in your actual life.

Actual television is where one finds meditations on how best to live an actual life.

We’re discussing property television shows.

Specifically, the property television shows that help people find a home abroad.

There’s something strange about these shows, something a little off-kilter. I watched several episodes of the same series (there are numerous competing franchises) before grasping this strangeness.

The show is about place. Where you would like to live, in an ideal situation.

Humans are concerned with place. How it feels to be in a place. What it means to have a place of your own. A room for yourself. How a place morphs into your idea of the place. Home. A house, a room, an apartment. A place to call home.

This has always been a thing.

Houses hold a certain fascination. Getting to poke around somebody else’s home is a real treat. If this person happens to be a celebrity, or someone whose house you wouldn’t normally see, even better. There’s an entire cultural moment spun around a particular television show that lets viewers see inside wealthy celebrity homes.

With this in mind, it’s not surprising that this property show, about people yearning to pack up and move to the sun, has such an audience.

The show suggests that you could live in a new place. Somewhere once confined to the fantasy of holiday. A place that people usually venture to, during two-weeks in July, for a burst of freshness. Newness. The best part about a holiday is the unfamiliarity of a place. In being somewhere unfamiliar, everything feels new and surprising. Anything feels possible. This atmosphere of place is central to the holiday feeling. In this world, It feels normal to relax, to lounge on a sun bed and drink cold things.

Certainly, you could never relax like this at home.

Why?

Because home is familiar. It’s the designated place for life. Living happens at home and relaxing happens on holiday. In the unfamiliarity of a holiday destination, you’re free to begin a new life, start new patterns, engage in new activities. A fresh sense of place makes rising at 1p.m. acceptable. It’s normal to lie all day at a pool before meandering back to an air-conditioned apartment to get ready for dinner. These routines make sense, as there is no other routine. On holidays we forge new patterns in our lives.

Just as these patterns begin to make sense, we return home.

Back to a familiar place. The place that greets us as we plod in with suitcases. The place that smells right and feels even better. After a holiday, it’s guaranteed that someone, over the course of un-packing and re-settling will say:

‘It’s good to be home, all the same’

Home feels good now, because we’ve been away from it.

It takes a foray out into the unknown, swimming in pools and wearing good clothes to dinner, to make home feel nice.

Being on a permanent holiday wouldn’t be a holiday.

It would be a life. A strange, new life.

Which is why, when the newest couple are considering open balconies and chequered floors, I wonder if they really want an apartment in the sun. A new life — an existence abroad.

Or, if they just want to be on holidays, forever.

Like us eager viewers, as we sit in our sitting rooms, watching actual television.

The problem with these property shows: they’re hawking a holiday as a new existence.

It’s not going on holidays if you’re never coming home.

I thinking about being in:

The Actual Television Bowl.

I think about going on holidays.