A quiet revolution has taken place in living rooms across the nation, and like most revolutions, it was born not of radical political ideology, but of total auditory incomprehension.

Sometime around the middle of the last decade, the creators of high-budget television drama reached a unanimous, unspoken agreement: human dialogue was no longer an essential component of storytelling. Henceforth, it was to be muttered into a thick woollen scarf by a troubled detective standing twelve feet from a rumbling waterfall. Sound engineers, equipped with mixing suites capable of simulating a seismic fault line across fourteen distinct audio channels, began calibrating speech at the exact decibel level of a field mouse whispering a state secret to a passing breeze.

The consequence is that millions of perfectly sensible households now sit before sixty-inch, ultra-high-definition screens with stark, white sans-serif text permanently plastered across the lower third of the glass.

I became acutely aware of this state of affairs on Thursday evening while attempting to watch forty-five minutes of a gritty regional police procedural. Having spent the first ten minutes adjusting the volume through a frantic range between level 14 (utter silence punctuated by the sound of my own breathing) and level 58 (a car door slamming with enough acoustic violence to dislodge the hallway picture frames), I capitulated. I reached for the remote, pressed the yellow button, and turned on the subtitles.

The transformation was immediate. My wife and I stopped watching the drama unfold and instead spent the next half hour diligently reading it.

We have, without formally admitting it to ourselves, executed a complete historical loop straight back to the era of silent cinema. The only material difference is that instead of a jaunty piano accompaniment and decorative title cards, we possess eight-channel digital surround sound delivering pin-sharp, immersive audio of a light drizzle hitting wet gravel, while two BAFTA-nominated actors exchange crucial murder motives in what sounds like underwater Morse code.

According to unwritten standards maintained by the Department of Acoustic Mischief, once captions are activated, they exert a gravitational pull upon the human eyeball that no amount of multi-million-pound cinematography can overcome.

One no longer notices the brooding shadows across the Yorkshire Moors, nor the subtle twitch of an actor’s jaw. Instead, the eye remains pinned to the bottom four inches of the screen, solemnly absorbing annotations such as ominous low drone intensifies followed swiftly by wet thud in distance. The text invariably steals the scene. If an unsuspecting vicar is about to be startled by an explosion, the subtitles graciously inform you of deafening blast precisely three-tenths of a second before the match is even struck, rendering suspense an obsolete historical concept.

Yet it remains a peculiar triumph of British domestic endurance. For seventy years, consumer electronics manufacturers laboured relentlessly to increase screen resolution, widen colour gamuts, and eliminate background hiss, solely so that the modern viewer might sit in semi-darkness and read an eight-hundred-word novella at twenty-four frames per second.

Perhaps, from a purely societal standpoint, this is a stealth victory for national literacy. In an era where long-form prose is supposedly under grave threat from ten-second internet video clips, the broadcasting industry has quietly tricked three generations of adults into reading three thousand words of dense Scandinavian dialogue every evening, simply to find out who forgot to lock the greenhouse door.

I suppose we ought to be grateful. Though as I sat there at ten o’clock, squinting at wind howls mournfully while the tea went entirely cold on the coaster, I couldn’t help feeling that Thomas Edison might have had a point after all.