When was the last time you called someone on their landline? Probably not recently according to new data that shows that, for the first time ever, most households in the UK no longer have a home phone. The number of households with landlines dipped below half to 47% this year, according to Ofcom’s annual technology tracker. Four-fifths of the 65-plus age group still use landlines. But only 16% of under-25s own one.
This is an inevitability, and maybe not such a terrible one. But anyone who remembers life before both mobiles and the internet knows that we have lost something strangely precious. At its most basic, the death of the landline is about the assertion of the control of the individual and about our tyrannical, casual expectation of full personalisation at all times. A mobile phone is something I could never have imagined even existing as a child, let alone owning: a personal phone that you can take everywhere with you. A phone that no one else is allowed to answer without your permission. You are the only one who talks on it. It’s your private device. Imagine. Whereas a landline … Well, that was a call anyone could answer – and usually you wouldn’t even know who was calling. If you’re under 30, this might sound deeply suspect. Nowadays we react to the idea that “it could be anyone” calling with horror. Once upon a time, it was a thrill.
The landline has become, like so many other things from the 20th century, a nostalgic remnant of our quaintly trusting old ways. This is the communal domestic phone as depicted with half-creepy, half-romantic, Vaseline-lens glamour in The Virgin Suicides, where the sisters’ suitors would play records down the phone and the girls would sit around the up-turned receiver listening to Todd Rundgren. Before the internet existed, your home phone was your hotline to the outside world. But it was a hotline that was guarded, shielded and policed – by your parents, by your siblings and by the fact that phone calls used to be more expensive. (“Get off that phone, we’re not made of money.”) It was as much a piece of furniture as a communication tool, kept, in most households, in a communal space, where others could almost certainly overhear your conversation.
It’s odd to remember now how phone numbers had to be learned by heart or written in an address book. Nowadays I wouldn’t know my own children’s numbers without my mobile. And yet I know the four-digit landline of my grandparents, even though they have been dead for more than 15 years. (Yes, four-digit phone numbers existed in the 1980s.) I could tell you the home phone number of the friends I called from an empty office in 1998 to ask them if they knew where on earth their friend was who I was supposed to be meeting for dinner. (The man who stood me up that autumn evening? Reader, I married him.) I haven’t called my friends’ landline in years but I guess I will always know that number, however antiquated and pointless the information. In fact I could recite dozens of numbers, not called in years but forever lodged in my memory bank. Something about the landline occupied a part of your consciousness.
Back in the days of four TV channels and sod all to do, the sound of the phone ringing was an occasion for great suspense and excitement. If you were a child, you would skid recklessly to answer it, not caring about the carpet burns. Because to answer the phone was to control the household and the lives of the people inside it: “Who shall I say is calling?” If your mum answered the phone and it was a friend of yours she didn’t like, then that might be a call you never found out about. The phone had its own personality, almost like another member of the family, with its own special platform, table or even its own room. Depending on the family, this would be located either in a hospitable place (talk as long as you like, we are a permissive household) or in an extremely hostile environment, such as a draughty corridor (keep it short, we run a tight ship). In our house there were multiple arguments about the phone cord. The cord did not lie. You knew who had last been on the phone and for how long according to the tangle.
Nowadays the only place I see a landline is on Instagram, where comedians such as Tom Sainsbury and Ruairi McInerney re-enact random old-school conversations, with much dramatic cord twirling. In my own house, the tragic thing is I don’t think I actually know where our home phone is now. It hasn’t rung for so long that I wouldn’t recognise the sound. I guess it must be buried somewhere, under stuff, the cord perfectly coiled and tangle-free. Maybe it’s time to resurrect it and keep the magic alive with a fully operational, highly prominent 1970s rotary dial model in a shade of pillar box red that screams “no surrender to the machines”. Just on the offchance that someone, somewhere, has my ancient number burned on their brain.
Viv Groskop is a comedian and author of One Ukrainian Summer
