Ian McMillan: Why everybody wants to be in the picture

I had to hold the insides of my pockets to keep my hands anchored and away from the lens and I had to concentrate really hard to stop myself doing a ridiculous cheesy grin, combined with an Ann Robinson-style wink, looking like a man wearing a half-finished Ian McMillan mask.

Then I thought to myself: wait a minute, I don’t need to wave my arms to get on TV. I’ve been on TV. I’m lucky enough to have been on TV lots of times. Keep your hands still, for goodness sake!

I looked around me and, even though the throw had been taken and the action had moved down the pitch, some of the people round me were still waving and gurning like mad. One bloke even shouted “Tell mi mam her teapot cover’s in’t middle drawer!”

Amazing: live television replacing the phone call or the text message.

I had an image of the lad’s silver-haired mother sitting in her front parlour, listlessly flicking through the channels from soap to film to football as she tried to put her lost teapot cover far from her mind. Then she saw their Keith at the match, heard his comforting message, and all was right with the world.

It was the same at the recent Barnsley by-election. As candidates and members of the public were interviewed on television, behind them, people were waving Labour placards or UKIP banners or simply waving at the camera. The placard-wavers had been told to placard-wave by party workers in suits, of course, but what about the rest of them? Why were they doing it?

On one level, the answer is a simple one: we want to be noticed and, more than that, we want to be immortal. We hope that our waving and grinning will become an unlikely YouTube hit and that complete strangers will approach us on a beach in Spain and say “Aren’t you that bloke I saw acting daft at the football? Shake my hand: I’ve always wanted to meet a celebrity!” You whip your pen out of your trunks and offer to sign his forearm.

I guess that when news leaked out among the Cro-magnon communities of Yorkshire that Ug the Cave Painter was on his way, crowds in badly-fitting and stinky animal fur rushed down to the mouth of the cave to try to get in the painting.

Some waved clubs and some just waved. Some grinned, showing blackened and chipped teeth. One held up a sign that said, in a primitive and since-lost runic language, “Tell mi mam the mammoth bone’s in the pot by the fire.”

Maybe not, though: perhaps this desire to get in the picture is a purely modern phenomenon. We’ve all seen old photographs of busy black-and-white streets taken at the end of the 19th century. There are people, often in their Sunday best, staring fixedly at the camera as though they’re sitting for a portrait in oils.

There are also what can only be described as blurs; ghostly smudges, which are actually people going about their business unmoved by the presence of the tripod and the photographer. Those indistinct citizens couldn’t care less about being in the frame: they just needed to get to the butchers before he ran out of sweetbreads. They’re a thing of the past though, literally. These days, everybody wants to be seen.

I’ve noticed that even in war zones, even in TV reports of the upheavals in the Arab world, in the middle of the fighting and the running and the shouting and the teargas you can sometimes see somebody, often a frightened child, lifting a timid hand to wave at the lens.

Maybe we’re heading for what science-fiction writers call a dystopia; a terrible future where everybody is on TV all the time but all they do is wave. Imagine the idea that waving and grinning and shouting “Hello Dad!” formed the prevailing idea of what made good television. The news is read by a sensible man in a sober tie who waves all the time.

On Coronation Street, the characters don’t interact with each other at the Rover’s Return. They simply stand in a line like a hen-party filmed for a documentary about late-night drinking; they’re not acting, they’ve waving both arms in the air and shouting “Wooooo!” It’s a chilling thought.

When you get interviewed on TV, the person interviewing you often says “ignore the camera and just look at me”. That’s good advice to us all. Ignore the camera. Stop waving. Just stop waving.