Don't Leave Me Hanging On The Telephone

Sybil Fawlty chattered on it for hours, Agatha Christie built whole plays around it and calling teenage sweethearts was a challenge, but the landline telephone is a phenomenon future generations will never know, reflects Rob Crossan

- Rob Crossan

Get off the phone! I’m not made of money.’ For anyone over the age of 35, this is a phrase that sends shivers down the spine.

Ofcom recently calculated that the amount of time we’re spending on landline phones has halved in the past five years. This news immediately transported me back to my teens—for those of us who remember a time before mobiles, the landline dial tone was our sole portal to the outside world that didn’t involve putting our shoes and coat on.

Our landline number defined us, to the point where, for decades, the custom was to announce it before even saying hello upon picking up the receiver for an incoming call.

It’s where the expression ‘telephone voice’ came from. For aspirational Britons over the past century, the introduction was a way to show whoever was calling that our estuary vowels were a thing of the past and we now had the kind of clipped, immaculate pronunciation of the number three that would surely impress any in-calling vicar, double-glazing salesman or Rotary Club chairman.

I spent roughly 20 years battling with landlines: from the age of 10, when I had to phone my uncle and aunt to say thank you for another disappointing Christmas present, to university halls of residence, where shouts would echo down the corridors in vain attempts to locate the person whose presence was required at the lone landing phone.

However, for me, the strongest memory of the landline telephone is as a teenager, in an act that I still feel is the ultimate foretaste to the manifest terrors of the adult world. Palms sweaty and voicebox semi strangulated with fear, I’d psych myself up for hours before tentatively dialling the number of whichever girl I fancied who had been kind enough to give me her—or, should I say, her parents’—number.