‘This post is a collaboration with TV Licensing (a trademark of the BBC), but all thoughts and experiences are my own.’
TV is a huge part of our lives when we are at home. It is the glue that keeps us together after a long day at work and at school, and a way that we can connect with our friends and family.
We all have our favourite programs that are scheduled. The kids love anything Strictly or Gladiators related, and the adults like the constant noise of the football or F1 motor racing.
Having these important times together, scheduled in our day, means that we get to spend time together in the same room and chat about our day over a good TV program. It’s a way to make the kids open up after an exhausting day at school or is a conversation starter with a friend who we haven’t seen in a while.
That’s why, when we heard about the BBC TVL Moments That Connect Us Campaign, we jumped at the chance to get involved.
Our 4 favourite TV moments
We all have our favourite TV moments but there’s a few that have brought us together with friends and family.
The first I can remember is at our eldest daughter’s baptism when the Summer Olympics in London was on. It was the first time a lot of our family had met my daughter, who was only 6 months old at the time. Having the Olympics so close to us in Southampton was amazing and we didn’t plan on missing any of it, but it just so happened that my mother-in-law had planned the baptism for the same day as the men’s football finals which was Mexico Vs Brazil.
My husband, his brother and my dad refused to miss it, so throughout the party, we would see the three of them, sometimes with my uncle as well, all watching the live sport on TV, which bounced between the men’s match to watching the highlights they had missed in the morning. It was so lovely (and funny) watching these grown men huddled around a small phone screen chatting about what was going on.
My next memory is of the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. We aren’t royalists, so we declined to go to our friend’s street party which had gone all out with picnic tables and bunting.
Instead, we went shopping in our local large shopping mall and were shocked to see how many people had gathered around a few of the TV screens. These screens normally just play the news, but that day, they had the royal wedding on. There were crowds, two to three people deep at each screen watching this moment happen live.
The kids got curious about what the fuss was about, so we stood at the back with them both on our shoulders and quickly whispered about Prince Harry and Meghan getting married and how exciting it was for the country to have another royal wedding in our lifetime. The children were fascinated by it. Not just by the wedding, or Meghan’s stunning dress, but by how excited everyone in the crowd was as well. A few people even cheered and clapped when the happy couple stood on the top of the church steps. The buzz of the crowd that day has never left me. Everyone was talking to each other, and it felt like a real moment to celebrate and made us rethink how we felt, as adults, about the royal family.
My third moment is with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s the one time in our house when everything stops, and we all come together for an hour or so. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first week and we haven’t picked our favourites yet, or any of the specials (we love musical week the most though); Strictly is our time together as a family to throw shade on each other for our dancing skills and to be dance judges for one night only that week.
It has become such an important tradition in our family that even our eldest child puts her phone down to her friends and the youngest stops playing Roblox so we can have this time together.
My fourth moment is watching Taskmaster over the first Covid lockdown. A group of old friends and I had started to arrange a weekly Zoom call and online games to try and keep us all sane during this time. A friend suggested Taskmaster to us on one of these calls and it sounded funny, so we started watching from season one.
Gosh! What a surprise these episodes were. They were funny, engaging and just laugh-out-loud weird, which is really what we needed during those crazy few months of lockdown.
Even though we hadn’t seen each other in weeks, Taskmaster became our weekly three-hour topic of conversation over Zoom. We would laugh over Josh Widdicombe’s silliness, argue over Tim Key’s genius (or not) and all remember how funny Frank Skinner’s one-liners were.
We ended up scheduling our Zoom calls over the Taskmaster schedule so we could watch it live “together” and really chat about it while it was on. It helped bring six friends together who were really struggling to keep in touch during a challenging time in all our lives.
Looking back at these times has shown me how important live TV was to us over many tough times or how it helped to start difficult conversions that I wasn’t sure how to start.
Your TV Licence lets you enjoy a huge range of live TV. It covers you for:
• All TV channels, like BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Dave, and international channels – but you don’t need a licence if you only watch non-BBC channels on-
demand
• Pay TV services, like Sky, Virgin Media, and BT – but these are platforms that could have both live and on-demand services
• Live TV on streaming services, like YouTube and Amazon Prime Video
• Everything on BBC iPlayer.
This includes recording and downloading. On any device.