ICE CREAM PANOPTICON
It's a watched girl summer
Welcome to HIGH RESOLUTION GORE & GRAPHIC VIOLENCE, a newsletter from TV writer Zoë Tomalin. The UK TV industry is currently collapsing. Unrelatedly, you can support my writing via a one-off or monthly tip on Ko-Fi.
The panopticon is an 18th century building design first conceived by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It is a prison in which a single guard, observing from a central watchtower, can see into every cell. Of course, this solo guard can’t possibly watch hundreds of people at once, but the prisoners are aware that at any time they MAY be being watched, so they alter their behaviour accordingly. French theorist Michel Foucault later used the panopticon as a metaphor to describe how citizens in disciplinary societies internalize the watching eye of the state, policing themselves and restricting their own freedom.
In the summer, the panopticon is also the design of my flat.
My partner and I live in a small ground floor flat with a shared garden. As soon as it hits 15 degrees, our neighbours install themselves in the garden, placing us in the Ice Cream Panopticon. There is now no room in our flat where we can open the curtains without making immediate, direct eye contact with our neighbours. Sometimes they are eating ice cream one metre from our bed. Sometimes they are barbequing meat smoke onto our obviously vegetarian laundry (purple denim, ambient musician tour t-shirts). But whatever they’re up to, they can always see and hear everything we are doing.
When you live in a terraced flat with thin walls, you’re constantly aware that you are essentially in the same room as your neighbours. Yes, you may technically be separated by a sheet of 1-ply toilet paper which your landlord has overenthusiastically daubed in off-white, but the separation is more symbolic than physical. You have to pretend you don’t hear them having sex. They have to pretend they don’t regularly hear you singing the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode. It’s a gentleman’s agreement.
However, it is not possible to pretend you are in a different room from your neighbour when the moment you open your curtains, they are sunbathing at your desk.
Still, it hasn’t all been bad. Yesterday, I finally discovered the benefits of living in the Ice Cream Panopticon. On Wednesday evenings, Jon goes to a French class and I cook dinner for 5pm so we can eat together before he heads out. This is my one act of trad-wifery in an otherwise egalitarian household. We split all the cleaning and cooking tasks 50/50. In fact, Jon does the majority of the washing up, and on Tuesday, he spent three hours baking and icing a coconut cake for me because I was unwell. Jon is the kind of man that misogynists claim is bringing about the decline of the West.
Wednesday. 3.30pm. I begin cooking a complicated curry that I am making because it will use up the remaining half of the coconut milk Jon opened for my giant cake. I’m still a bit unwell, but I’m ready.
Meanwhile, our neighbours have been sat outside all day, sunbathing whilst their small dogs bark at the glass door every time I sneeze, a feature of the Ice Cream Panopticon which even Jeremy Bentham would have deemed too cruel.
Almost immediately, I realise I need the star anise fetched down from a high shelf, and I know just the emasculated beta male for the job. I call Jon through apologetically. He helps, but he’s not happy about it, because he is working to a deadline before he goes out, and I promised not to disturb him only 10 minutes ago. Then, as he leaves, he turns towards the window, and notices the neighbours.
“Just let me know if you need any more help,” he says.
I’m confused.
“But you have a deadline?”
He glances at the window, accidentally catching the eye of the neighbour.
“Yeah but, your work is important too,” he says, mechanically.
“My pitch isn’t due until tomorrow. It’s fine.” I say.
“Well, just let me know if you feel too ill,” he replies, patting my back awkwardly.
He goes back to work, and I look absent-mindedly out the window, locking eyes with two neighbours in sequence, a pass the parcel of social discomfort. Then I realise what is happening. Jon is having to perform feminism because I am – as far as the neighbours are concerned – already cooking for Jon at 3.40pm, despite being visibly ill, making a complex meal timed precisely to his schedule, and I am worried about disturbing him from his work. Poor Jon must look like a real bastard, I think. That’s not fair at all.
Then I call him through again.
“Actually, can you cut up the peppers?”
“Of course,” he says, through a rigid smile, “I can make the curry paste too if you want.”
“No no, it’s fine. I can finish my important pitch whilst you’re out.”
Jon glowers at me. He now knows that I know that he knows he’s trapped in a virtue-signalling late-Georgian prison.
“If you’re sure,” he says, through gritted teeth.
“Yes, I can finish my big TV pitch for a major streaming platform after dinner.”
“You know what,” says Jon. “I’ll cook.”
Foucault was wrong. The panopticon rocks.
P.s. This week I wrote on both Have I Got News For You and lovely Radio 4 series Ivo Graham’s Obsessions. Earlier this month I was part of a development writers room for a Sky sitcom. Not to be too much of a flirt, but I am looking for more work in June.
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