First there were the creaky knees and a newly sprouted chin hair (her name’s Gertrude). Now, my journey from carefree youth to cranky middle-age has taken on a new element: I’ve started to watch TV with subtitles on. I don’t know whether it’s my ageing ear, sound mixing or modern acting techniques, but actors seem to mumble a lot these days. And the background noise is often way louder than the dialogue. Not as loud as the ads, though. Those are, by design, significantly louder than the shows.
Turns out I’m not quite over the hill yet: my TV-watching habits are all the rage among kids these days. A study last November found that four out of five viewers aged between 18 and 25 said they use subtitles “all or part of the time” compared with only a quarter of those aged between 56 and 75. There are various reasons for this, including the fact that the likes of Netflix have opened up the availability of non-English-language programming (which is one of the best things about streaming services), and have helped normalise subtitles for people who aren’t hard of hearing.
