Gogglebox's Giles and Mary on Strictly, Bake off, bickering... and keeping their marriage alive
Giles
We are sceptical about fame. I like the Tennyson quote, ‘Modern fame is nothing. I’d rather have an acre of land.’ Luckily we have an acre of land next to our cottage but are we famous? Famous for watching television? Absurd if so. However, on the few occasions I venture from my cottage- comfort-zone, I am invariably accosted by people who seem to know me by, and might even address me by, the nickname that both Mary and I call one another – ‘Nutty’.
Mary
As a socially insatiable woman who conflates shopping with achievement, I go out much more often than Giles does. I am now greeted by at least six beaming faces per hour. Then the friendly person will say, ‘Are you Mary off Gogglebox?’ When I confirm that I am, the interlocutor usually responds, ‘I’ve got to tell you something...’ (long pause) ‘...your husband makes us laugh.’
Giles
Despite watching so much television, we find it impossible to recognise many of the people deemed to be celebrities these days. Not surprising, considering there may now be, as one wag noted, ‘more people on television than there are watching it’. And yet, we have now apparently joined their ranks. I would say that Mary and I are the least capable of all the Gogglebox contributors in identifying who these other so-called celebrities are.
In my middle-class childhood we were brought up to regard television-watching as a sort of last resort or even a vice. Instead, we were encouraged to play board games, sing madrigals, or look at the night sky and learn the constellations. Things were different in Mary’s house, where they watched it for five hours a night.
Mary
Giles loves to attribute to his family a higher moral rank than that enjoyed by my own. Higher cultural rank, yes, but moral and cultural are not interchangeable. I would suggest that the Northern Irish pillars of Presbyterian probity who made up my family, doctors, ministers etc, may well have needed to watch more telly to recover from the stress of public service. Giles’s family took a more leisurely view towards work.
Giles
Mary and I don’t watch prime-time, shiny-floored telly shows, except for Gogglebox reasons. Neither The Great British Bake Off nor Strictly Come Dancing would have attracted us naturally, but we have now been worn down by these elimination programmes, featuring emotional incontinences, such as hugging and sobbing when the contestants bow out. We feel entirely ill at ease, like strangers in a strange land, in modern Britain, where some fresh outrage attacks our sense of societal norms on a daily basis. We define ourselves mostly by what we disapprove of rather than what we like. And, of course, we never swear.
Mary
Of course Giles swears – especially since he’s constantly having minor domestic accidents as a result of ‘rushing at things’ when he’s ‘hungry and shattered’ – but we female family members (we have two daughters) have a zero-tolerance policy on swearing within the cottage, which is tiring to adhere to, but seems to bear results.
We have less success when we try to discourage him from ‘negging’ – or man grumbling. Is it only women who’ve taken on the message about positive thinking? Men seem to only really become animated when complaining.
Giles constantly moans about ‘having’ to watch television, yet before he had to watch it he did so extremely willingly. Indeed it was his main leisure activity. Whereas I hardly watched it all... I was too busy working.
Giles
But perhaps this lack of enthusiasm for television was exactly why Channel 4 wanted to hire us – to meet their diversity quota. One Gogglebox-obsessive fan suggested to me, ‘They tend to put you and Mary on [air] if the other families are becoming overexcited.’
Presumably, we have a dampening effect, like the soft pedal on a piano. But although we don’t swear, we are not intellectual snobs. There is psychological interest in First Dates and, as a red-blooded male, I enjoy watching fake-tanned girls clad in togas in the ITV2 series Bromans.
Mary
Shows like that are all searchlights, deafening music, audiences on their feet irrationally cheering and applauding, mass hysteria. But we have also loved some of the programmes we would never have seen, had we not been watching them for Gogglebox.
Giles
The most enjoyable programme I watched this year was Peter York’s study of a new tribe called hipsters [Peter York’s Hipster Handbook on BBC4]. What made it so funny was York, in the mode of David Attenborough, forensically investigating the absurdity of this new urban tribe, which has presumably evolved as a reaction to the crisis in masculinity.
The worrying thing was that most hipsters sat alongside women all day, pinging on keyboards and eating organic food, while dressed up as lumberjacks in their checked shirts with their beards and moustaches. Yet here they were in Dalston, east London, miles from the nearest redwood tree.
Giles and Mary
Mary
Before Gogglebox, I would never have dreamt of watching either Doctor Foster or Liar, yet I found both drama series so engrossing that I completely forgot myself, and so watching them was a form of self-therapy like mindfulness (or maybe mindlessness). Yet both final episodes were unsatisfactory in resolution terms... Probably to leave the door open for further series.
Giles
One of the first comments I made on Gogglebox was during a documentary about Mafia bosses, in response to a dodgy gangster. I noted that he had criminal earlobes. I had read about the shape of criminal earlobes in the papers and I have a retentive memory for the weird and unexpected. (At school, instead of being called ‘Wood’, I was called ‘W O Odd’ because I could regurgitate such facts.)
After three years, Giles still doesn’t understand that the purpose of the show is to review what everyone else in the country is watching
In addition, I often experience the strange effects of quantum entanglement. What else could explain my ability to correctly answer one of the most complex mathematical questions ever posed on University Challenge? But I do know about art, nature, British butterflies, wild flowers, macro-moths and classical music. It’s a shame I never get to comment on these subjects on Gogglebox.
Mary
After three years on Gogglebox, Giles still doesn’t understand that the purpose of the show is to review what everyone else in the country is watching. He’s always amazed he never gets to comment on his favourite programme, Britain’s Lost Masterpieces.
Giles
Don’t imagine that watching telly for a living is a walk in the park. I am often reminded of my grandmother’s dictum, ‘Work is not work unless you’d rather be doing something else.’
Mary
I absolutely love it... The best thing of all is that I don’t have to pack a handbag with my make-up, iPad, wallet and keys, then commute to work. I just have to sit down in front of a crackling log fire and watch telly.
Giles
When we do go out, though, the hardest thing is when we are recognised and have to work out how to respond when someone says, ‘We like your sense of humour. It’s very dry.’ Do you say, ‘It’s a fair cop, guv’? I usually volunteer, ‘I don’t think we’re nearly as good as the Malones. Mr Malone really cracks me up.’ (And we also love the German man who only says ‘fawking hell’ each week.)
I have never thought of myself as a goodwill ambassador, but these waves of genuine affection do surprise me. It could be that we represent a certain stereotype of Englishness with our thatched cottage and William Morris interiors; a type that, were it an animal, would be regarded as being at risk of extinction.
Giles and Mary
We had a wave of well-wishers helping when I managed to spill a bag of pistachios on the floor at Lidl. But very few people seemed to recognise us at the centenary commemoration of the Battle of the Somme in Marlborough College Chapel. We had a lovely day at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden where a woman told us she loved watching us because it was ‘so enjoyable to watch people being themselves’.
Being myself is for me a hornet’s nest of complexity. My analyst also said that I am multifaceted, so it is hardly surprisingly that I find myself channelling, in turn, Sheridan Morley, Michael Aspel, Alan Partridge and, occasionally, Frank Spencer. I am no good at emoting, so they have yet to use me on Red Nose Day reviews.
I blame it all on attending a public school (Shrewsbury – the same one as Charles Darwin) because, after all, we live in a blame culture these days. I must stop now. I’ve suddenly come over all vulnerable.
Mary
Nature never intended for man and wife to be 24/7 in each other’s company. I work at home and Giles perceives that he too ‘works’ at home. (He sees ‘creating habitat for overwintering invertebrates’ as work.) I envied Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble, who enjoyed a successful marriage by living next door to each other.
We know another couple who, instead of breaking up when they began to find each other intolerable, simply built another kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, and carried on in the same house. It meant that their children’s lives didn’t need to be disrupted. But what can you do if both of you work at home and you can’t afford to do those things?
Giles
What is not shown on television is the rest of our normal life, 99 per cent of which consists of Mary writing articles or doing admin, while I am busy with conservation work. This is why conversation flows quite well during the so-called preambles between the programmes.
We represent a certain type of Englishness that, were it an animal, would be regarded as being at risk of extinction
We have so much to say to each other that we didn’t have time to say before. We can also use this time as a sort of parliament to thrash out domestic business. Moreover, in chatting like this we’ve been reminded that we actually quite enjoy each other’s company and have a lot in common.
Mary
What’s also been wonderful about the show is that it allowed us to write a book about our lives. While writing it we compiled daily diaries – this was an opportunity to put our marriage grievances down on paper. I would recommend it to anyone as a means of improving your marriage.
Instead of paying a therapist ￡100 an hour or whatever to listen to you complaining about your other half, you can write it all down and reach the same conclusion. It’s not that bad.
All you want is to get these things off your chest. It has been very good for me to be reminded of the main reason why I married Giles. He used to make me laugh in the days before anxiety over cash became the dominant theme of our lives.
And now that we have a tiny trickling income stream from Gogglebox (I’m not joking) it’s made all the difference... and I can enjoy his jokes again.
The Diary of Two Nobodies, by Giles Wood and Mary Killen, is published by Virgin (￡14.99). To order your copy for ￡12.99 plus p&p, call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk