For Yasmin Walker, a humanitarian worker stationed in northern Iraq, returning to simpler times by listening to radio plays she first heard as a kid helped calm her nerves during a stressful and chaotic time. “When missiles were launched at a nearby air base in January and there was talk of evacuating us, I cleaned my entire apartment while listening to The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie. It was the same again after getting out of the country on the last flight before they closed the airspace because of Covid-19 – I had Agatha on my headphones,” she says.
“Agatha is from a very specific time in my life – from when I was about nine or 10 and my family used to sit around and listen to them. They’re set in the 1920s and 30s, which for some reason I find a really comforting time. If I’m really stressed, I can almost physically feel the effect they have on me. I clearly remember that feeling when I was cleaning my apartment – your heart rate and breathing slows and it’s like a warm fog goes into your brain and dampens down all the stress. I don’t even really listen to the storyline, the tone is enough.”
Psychotherapist and author of The Phone Addiction Workbook, Hilda Burke, agrees it’s possible to find shelter and reassurance in a familiar TV or radio show. “I can imagine that in situations where you’re faced with an unpredictable and dangerous environment, you would find comfort in being ‘cocooned’ by a familiar TV or radio show. Maybe the unconscious driver being ‘nothing bad can happen when I’m watching or listening to x’,” she explains.
Of course one of the hardest things about living day-to-day life in lockdown, amid strict social distancing measures, is a lack of human contact – many people have not had any physical contact, such as a hug, with another person, nor had a face-to-face conversation for more than a few minutes, for several weeks.
Although wrapping ourselves in the comfort blanket of feelgood cultural favourites doesn’t replace touch, or conversation, they can help with loneliness by rooting – and routing – us to people we are close to. “Nostalgic entertainment gives our lives a sense of personal history, meaning and belonging, as we appreciate our connection with our communities and significant others, and ourselves,” says Dr Pointer, who’s recently revisited the Back to the Future trilogy and Edward Scissorhands. In terms of Indian TV, it could be the appeal of fantasy as much as nostalgia: after the success of The Ramayan, DD National is set to bring back another mythological series, Sri Krishna. Either way, it allows us to escape – into another world, and another time.
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