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Many of us delight in the sound of a far-away friend’s voice without the distraction of a visible face to go with it; we relish the freedom to pick up the receiver and ring someone for no specific reason and with no need to make an appointment.
For those of us who grew up in the great age of the landline that was exactly what telephone calls were: audio-only and spontaneous. Now, in the age of video calls and texting, phone calls seem to have lost both of those wonderful attributes.
When was the last time you dared to ring someone for an unplanned audio chat, with no particular piece of information to impart? Most of us have, at the very most, one friend left in the world who still allows such spontaneity.
One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor, made the world’s first telephone call from his Boston laboratory. Beckoning Thomas Watson, his assistant, who was in the next room, he uttered the words: “Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.”
They were slightly anticlimactic, as first-ever telephone words, because the whole point of the call, which Bell had just made possible by his brilliant invention, was to talk to someone you could not instantly summon.
And that’s exactly what the public loved and took to in their millions – and it’s what some of us still love: to connect intimately with someone far off.
To do that now, one is expected to send a text: “Are you free for a quick chat?” Having sent that message, and received the answer “Yes give me five mins”, you feel you can’t then just ring them for no reason. You have to come up with a reason for the call – when all you really long for is to hear their voice.
Five years ago, by which time impromptu phone calls were already in steep decline thanks to the growth of the text message, it used to be that only our mothers rang us out of the blue. And it was young people who avoided phone calls like the plague.
Now, even the older generation has mostly stopped daring to initiate unprompted calls, having been reprimanded by their impatient and anxious offspring who can’t stand being forced into directionless conversation. I bet many older people miss those aimless conversations, even if the young don’t.
For wonderful things can emerge from long, unplanned telephone chats. As Mary Killen, who found fame on Channel 4’s Gogglebox reality TV show, wrote recently: “I like being able to think things through by talking them through. Truths emerge from extended conversations – especially when, as in the psychiatrist’s chair, there is no eye contact.”
Over the past decades, she has fixed up jobs and romantic relationships for her friends, piecing together the data and possibilities on the telephone in what she calls “long-form chats”. She is appalled that BT’s latest so-called “digital upgrades” have made phone lines much worse, especially if you live in the countryside.
It’s not only in the domestic sphere that the decline of the spontaneous phone call has changed the way we conduct our lives. In many offices, too, it’s frowned upon to pick up the phone and have a quick chat about something. You’re expected to book a Zoom or Teams call. And you have to look at the person and the ceiling of their ill-lit office – or (worse) at the fake background of books they’ve put behind them.
You might have thought that in the olden days, when phone calls were expensive, we would have made fewer of them, and that now, when they’re cheap, we would make more of them. But the exact opposite is the case.
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Perhaps there was an added thrill, in the 1970s and 1980s, when we were having those long, illicit phone chats with our beloveds, in knowing we were “racking up our parents’ phone bill”.
There was a pleasing cussedness in that, as there also was when you were in a phone kiosk enjoying an extended chat and the people queuing outside in the rain were starting to look furious, but you just turned nonchalantly away, taking no notice of them as you fed in more coins to extend the long, glorious conversation.
