By Paul Atherton FRSA
Where would my life be without Frasier?
It’s really funny, it’s on in the background here in the apartment hotel that I’m staying in as part of the Covid lockdown’s Everyone In.
And I’ve had a tough weekend, in fact I’ve had a tough Sunday. I’ve always hated Sundays as a child, because everything just stops and I’m not good with stopping because I’ve usually got two hundred things I need to get done that day. And if they don’t got done then I’ve got four hundred things to get done on Monday. The rest of the country goes to sleep, lazes around, washes their car, mows the lawn, or watches some back-to-back television series, but I wanna work or be productive, be creative, do things.
So I’d woken up this morning and I was feeling forlorn to say the least. And then in the background, Frasier and Niles are doing classic Frasier and Niles things – their father complaining about his skin feeling tense and taut after they’ve just been to a spa.
“I itched my chin and my eye closed”, Martin’s retort.
And the funny thing is, when I was 16 I was living on my own, I’d got my first flat together, and I was beginning to suffer with agoraphobia, I’d managed to persuade Granada to rent me a television through a variety or not being quite honest on their various application forms.
And after about two months I remember, I hadn’t smiled. I’d been locked inside, I’d not gone out because of the agoraphobia, And in that moment Cheers! came on. And that soundtrack that everybody knows, everybody knows your name.
And I remembered all the times that I’d walk into a pub in the welsh valley village whence I came, Ystrad Mynach, either the Cooper’s Arms, or The Beech Tree Hotel, or the Royal Oak, or even The Junction up in Hengoed. And that moment where everybody goes, ‘Hey Paul!’
And I felt a bit better.
And then Sam Malone came up with a classic one-liner and I smiled. And in that moment I remember how long it’d been since I’d smiled. And that was the turning point, that was the first step to recovering from months of agoraphobia. And I often wonder if I didn’t have a television, how that would have ended, Would I have ever found that moment where you break months of depression and say actually I can still smile, I can still find the brightness in a very, very dark world.
And so it happened again this morning with Frasier, and it’s playing silently on in the background now.
And I think people need to remember those kind of things when they do their usual poverty shaming of, ‘How can he afford… if he’s poor and homeless how can he afford a tablet?’, ‘How can he afford a laptop?’, ‘How can he afford a mobile phone?’
And it’s like, well perhaps they can’t.
But without them, they’ll probably never recover.
