Dick’s infatuation with television made him as much a true citizen of the 1960s as Sally and Peter Lykiard. He was fascinated by the way in which television theatricalised everything while anchoring it firmly to the domestic and mundane. Since leaving Cambridge he had jettisoned his own past and begun to float free into this electronic realm that, like a kindly sky, taught the audience to admire itself. In an unguarded moment, he told me of his childhood in Scotland, the son of a stony Edinburgh architect and his devout Presbyterian wife. Wartime evacuation to relatives in Australia had opened his eyes to the charms of a beach culture where affection and approval came, not from within the family, but from the world around it.

Not surprisingly, Dick had never married. Without the ever-present autocue and monitor screen, a close relationship would have seemed a little unreal. But his awareness of his own flaws made him an astute psychologist, and he was an endless fund of ideas, many at my expense. The house in Shepperton always intrigued him.

“You’ve been to Jim’s place in Shepperton, Sally?”

“Of course. It’s a shrine.”

“Absolutely. Freud’s primal cave furnished with wall-to-wall carpeting and a million years of love. In the long run, suburbia will triumph over everything, though it’s hard to tell if the suburbs are a city’s convalescent zone or a kind of petting zoo. In fact, they may be where a city dreams—Jim’s like a sleeper poised at the onset of REM sleep. But before he wakes, let me show you round the lab. Nothing is quite what it seems, rather like reality in a way…”

In a darkened lecture theatre a volunteer panel of housewives, secretaries, and off-duty firemen stared at the photographs of unnamed men and women projected onto a screen, trying to identify which were murderers and which victims.

“In fact, they’re photos of the previous panel,” Dick whispered to Sally. “People have remarkably strong prejudices about certain facial characteristics. The smallest cues convince them that they’re looking at a child rapist or a Gestapo killer.”

In the laboratory next door a second group of volunteers were completing a confidential questionnaire about the effect of violent newsreels on their sex lives.

“Of course, there’s no influence at all,” Dick assured us, “and the footage we show them is much less violent than we tell them it’s going to be. What’s interesting, though, is that most people assume it does improve their sex lives. Everyone says there’s too much violence on TV, but secretly they want more.”

“So, thanks to TV, everything is the opposite of what it seems?” I commented.