Why I Enjoy Dialling

This is the one I was thinking of.

There is a black and white photograph (what film it comes from I don’t know), of Hedy Lamarr, reputedly the world’s most beautiful woman if 1940s P.R. is to be believed. She is holding a telephone receiver to her ear and looking both past the camera (possibly at a yawning boom operator) and fantastic. You know by looking at her that she’s in a drama. You just know she’s talking to a smirking alpha with a moustache and a double breasted suit and you know she’s going to end the call with an emphatic slamming down of the receiver, or maybe she will replace it slowly and deliberately with silent, restrained emotion. What she does straight after that you won’t find out, however, because the scene is inevitably cut there. There’s no need to see more, the message has been sent. We, the audience, already know what’s going on in her head and in her heart.

This picture wouldn’t work with an iPhone, you’d just assume she was ordering Japanese food or expounding plot exposition with a hipster hacker in front of a screen somewhere. Either way you would, in this scenario, almost certainly find out what she does afterwards because you would get a few seconds of post-call reaction. You have to; watching someone talking on an iPhone is just not that evocative.

Similarly, while in the days of bakelite and braided cable you would often see a character dialling, you rarely see anyone searching through a smartphone menu in a film, unless the content of the menu is necessary to move the plot forward. The activity within itself is emotionally meaningless. It’s too new and we have attached no symbolism to it. Even when you see someone doing it in real life there’s an awful, blank-faced sterility about it. Dialling on a rotary dial is different. It’s more of a physical action. The visual impact of it builds tension. Even the mechanical click-whirr seems to build a connection with the character on the other end of the dialling finger that thumbing a menu, even with Idris Elba scowling down at it, cannot.

This is some of the reason, I think, why I enjoy dialling. I didn’t dial for years and never realised I missed it. like everyone else I have a smartphone and if I do feel the need to go wired when I’m out and about I’m usually a button man, as this is what is universally available. I am, however, old enough to remember the time when push-button phones first became popular and everyone had to have one. They were modernity, sophistication, the pina colada of British Telecom supplanting the warm beer of the General Post Office. This obsolescence of style, although we could not know it, foreshadowed the irrational orgy of consumption to which the communication hardware market would aspire. Even the Trimphone became old. You felt more dynamic hitting buttons, more immediate, more - dare I say it - American. J.R. Ewing pressed buttons to dial or, more accurately, he pressed one button and his secretary dialled, but she (yes, she: this was J.R.) would press buttons. Before you knew it, all of Britain was sleek, stark and modern. You would no more catch Ultravox on a rotary dial telephone than you would Tubbs or Crockett.

The spread of the communication cocaine that is the mobile telephone was a further revolution, the end of staying in and pacing fretfully while awaiting the life changing call from that special girl/boy/employer/G.U.M. doctor.

There are many people to thank for the astonishing impact of the mobile telephone, not least among them Gene Roddenbury and Captain Kirk for the inspiration and indeed Hedy Lamarr who, as well as being the most beautiful woman in the world and a Hollywood star of the kind you just don’t get any more, was a mathematician and electronics genius. When she wasn’t in front of the camera simpering to her chest-measurement I.Q. leading men, Lamarr worked out the spread-spectrum, frequency hopping technology which enables you to carry on an unbroken call as you cross from cell to cell. She wasn’t thinking about telephones of course (this was the 1940s and people were still happy to be tethered to the wall by their ears) she was trying to control musical instruments remotely. I’ve no idea why she wanted to do this, or if there was a need for it at the time, but there would shortly be a definite need to prevent Johnny Nazi jamming the signals of good American radio controlled torpedoes, which is how the technology was first usefully employed. I would have liked to say you wouldn’t catch Hedy Lamarr being J.R.’s secretary but I expect you would if the script called for it and they could afford her. Some revolutions take longer than others.

Even our phone books have become electronic and dialling of any kind has almost gone out of vogue altogether. Indeed it feels odd and old fashioned now even to have to push buttons. Everything is getting very electronic. No, that’s the wrong word, it was always electronic. Everything is getting very digital. As communication gets more effortless, the process loses something of its soul. Yes we can talk to whoever we want, whenever we want and wherever we want but the activity within itself becomes devalued. There is - to my mind - a payoff between the increasing ease of connection via layers of technology and an increasing emotional disconnection with the actual process.

What I mean by that can be illustrated by looking at the parallel changes in the music recording industry over the decades. When you listen to a studio album now, a great deal of effort has gone into the production. The musicians have likely played in a special environment to separately record the sound of each instrument so that they may be expertly mixed, with echo and reverb to make everything sound more “natural”. The best parts of many takes will be stitched together and the overall final product that meets your ears will be as close to perfection as the recording engineer and producer can make it. That’s a wonderful thing, assuming their ideas of musical perfection agree with yours and recorded music sounds incredible now, especially as, with more digital storage space available we start to move beyond the CD and have access to the same resolution, range and depth in what we buy as was heard in the studio. Contrast this with an old 1920s blues 78. The recording process for this, in its simplest form, involved musicians playing and singing into a horn mechanically vibrating the recording stylus, which cut the wax of the master disc, which in turn was used to make the record. The quality will be terrible to modern ears, the sound reedy, thin and metallic and most likely scratchy. Why people still love and collect them however is because of that connection, the emotional bond with the process. When you hear a 1920s acoustic recording you’re only two handshakes away from the guy with the guitar. How much value does this have? In 2013 John Tefteller, not a particularly wealthy man, paid $37100 for a copy of Tommy Johnson’s 1929 recording “Alcohol And Jake Blues”

It was this sensation of increasing disconnection that got me nostalgically hankering after and then searching for an old rotary dial telephone. I wanted to dial like Roger Moore in The Saint again. It’s possible what I was actually doing was making a futile subconscious effort to reconnect with the less complicated years of my youth when the action of one finger could summon a whole group of us to an evening dedicated solely to fun, with fewer of the nonsensical emotional distractions that, like rust, accumulate with time. Originally, I would have been happy with the 1960s/70s GPO models of my childhood, the ones that sat in the hall at home that you see Jack Regan shouting into. In the end however, I couldn’t resist the 'otel réception elegance of a black and gold 1940s Belgique Bell telephone. Not quite Hercules Poirot country, but not far off.

I’ve been rotary dialling in the privacy of my own home now for some time and from it I still derive a great deal of simple if curious enjoyment. I know I’m lying to myself and my conversation partner of the moment isn’t simply at the end of a copper wire, but I find myself able and happy to go along with the illusion. Even the dialling in of foot-long mobile numbers is a harmless pleasure rather than a chore. I’m even beginning to remember some frequently used numbers (incidentally, I can still remember all my friends’ telephone numbers from when I was a teenager).

  If by any chance you do have cause to call me on my landline you may well imagine you hear me speaking with a slightly posher accent than I do on my mobile. Please understand it’s not an affectation on my part, it’s just how you sound through vintage bakelite. It’s also worth bearing in mind, should you decide to pick an argument, that I can’t lose, because even if you bite your mobile in half and throw it into a lake it won’t be as satisfying as crashing 380 grams of bakelite into its cradle with the same defiantly cheeky ding that Hedy Lamarr would have heard.

                                                   AA