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Nancy Woods was the lead presenter of the local 6 o’clock TV News Broadcast. As you can imagine, looks are very important to such a person, and this was true enough of Nancy too: she was the archetypal tall, slim, curvaceous attractive presenter, always seen neatly but attractively turned out in a fairly neutral skirt suit of some sort. Alas, the newsdesk hid her true glory: two lovely legs. But what the viewers saw on TV was plenty good enough, lovely smile, a lush but controlled mane of blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes and a personality to match. She could do no wrong for her producer nor her fans, who gave her plenty of complements and more besides in her fan mail.
It was a short time past her thirty-sixth birthday when the problems I am writing about first came to anyone’s attention. Since about the age of eight she’d been quite longsighted, and in those days had to wear, to her, such horrid-looking, eggy-like glasses. Since the age of sixteen she got contacts and consigned the glasses, now at around the plus 8 mark, to home use if she really had to, certainly not in front of the all-seeing camera. Alas, during her thirties her eyes had begun to dry out and wearing contacts for more than a few short hours was beginning to be real pain, literally speaking.
One day she came back from the optician who had again told her to quit wearing contacts, because they weren’t helping matters at all. She told her Producer about her problem for the first time: he was considerably shocked, since she had never mentioned her contacts at all to him. He not unreasonably asked to see her in glasses, thus she went into the toilet for a few minutes and swapped them over. When he saw her he nearly gagged: he was overcome by the magnifying effect of her thick plus 9 lenses on her eyes, making them ludicrous, lit up and inflated things, blinking and forcing their way into his mind, whether he wanted to see them or not. He told her he was extremely reluctant to let her front the news programme, and in fact asked someone else to read it that night. Nancy told him ‘I can’t begin to read the autocue without glasses, and close up stuff is just, well, a smudge.’ That didn’t really help her either. But her producer was ready to accept some sort of improvement in the look of her lenses, if that were possible. He sent her away to find an answer.
She went back to her optician with a strange-sounding plan. She remembered when her glasses needed to be only plus 6 or so, the way they inflated and illuminated her eyes less so, giving a rather more attractive impression than her current prescription, around +9 with some astigmatism. She said to him, ‘can you make me a pair of glasses for my current script, and also a pair for, say, 3 dioptres less.’ Of course he was curious as to why, and when he heard why, he was all but dead against the suggestion. ‘But… your eyes will be so strained, you need the correction to see into the distance and read the autocue. I think taking 3 dioptres off will make the autocue unreadable. I might only be able to take off one, and by the sound of things that won’t achieve what you hope it will.’
Nancy was adamant, and wished to try. She knew the size of autocue lettering and how far away it was, and after telling him what these were, he calculated that she needed to read the 20/60 line on the eyechart to be sure of reading the news on the autocue. After some of the usual can-you-read-this type stuff, he came to the conclusion that two and a half dioptres could be removed from her script whilst leaving her still able to see the autocue. Nancy was OK about that, better than the one or nothing as he’d suggested earlier. So the lab at the back got on with preparing her two scripts, one plus 9 and the other plus 6.5, both in the most attractive and apt frames they could find for her: sleek ovoid metal ones. In about an hour they were ready. Nancy tried on both pairs, found she could read the line on the chart as required with the weaker pair, and then kept them on in an attempt to get used to them. The optician was sceptical whether she’d be able to tolerate the inexact correction for long, but left her to it, assuming she’d soon give up.
She went back to work, refusing to swap her glasses, despite her eyes aching and clamouring for the other pair. She tried to avoid close work like the plague, and went to see her Producer as soon as she could. She simply said she’d got her lenses re-ground and made thinner, a complete lie, and this was the result: a markedly better looking pair of lenses. In that she was not wrong, for it was a definite improvement on the look. He wasn’t excited by her appearance, but at least she had her looks to pull her through, he fervently hoped.
So, a few hours later she sat and read the news looking through her new glasses. She dared not say a word about her other, stronger glasses, keeping them in her handbag out of sight. By the time she’d finished her eyes were running up the white flag and wondering “where’s those thicker lenses?” She longed for a quick peep through them, but then squashed that thought. She’d need to wait until she was home until she could take off the inadequate glasses and switch to her plus nines. Once home, she did this: instantly her eyes seemed to swim in delight, especially when asked to look at things close up.
The public reaction to the news that the tall, slender, delicious Nancy Woods needed fairly thick specs to read the news was pretty good, really. Some of the comments were a little silly, such as “why don’t you get contacts?’ Nancy sighed, and patted her thicker lenses back onto her little nose. If only… but it was impossible now. Her eyes would not take contacts for more than a few minutes before they squealed. It didn’t matter really: before long everyone had got used to seeing Nancy in her plus 6.5 lenses. Little did anyone realise that they were not enough.
Another Monday afternoon came, and Nancy was in the thick of preparing her news broadcast that evening. All the time her eyes were fighting to focus, and grumbling for more correction, especially at close range. She did her best to compensate, slyly holding things far away and straining to see. One sheet put in front of her she couldn’t read; her vision could only make the letters into groups of little blurs. She had to have a look at it with her stronger lenses. So, she made excuses, tucked the paper in her bag and went to the toilet. Once inside, out came her full scrip glasses and they got swapped. Her eyes danced with glee… and she read it, memorising it as best she could. For a few precious moments her vision was sharp and clear into the distance, and also close up: but she dared not keep it this way. She’d found that once she started looking at things close up, her eyes wouldn’t re-adapt to her weaker specs so well. So, reluctantly she swapped back, and was once more immersed in the frustrating slight blur she’d got used to seeing more than half the time. Once outside, she could go to the meeting with the printed sheet she couldn’t read, but still had a good idea what was where on the sheet and what said what, with a little luck enough to bluff her way though.
Then the newscast came, some hours later. Alas, there was a shock to come: Nancy usually prepared her own autocue texts, but had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual input of them into the system. She got a shock that evening: the system was different, a faster, more responsive system, designed to follow her speed of speech. It also happened to have slightly smaller lettering on. For someone with 20/20 distance vision, absolutely no problem. For Nancy, with her 20/60 vision at distance, quite definitely and in no uncertain terms, a problem. It was just possible for her to read the autocue that night, with a little careful straining when the camera was off her, and from memory, but the letters started to merge into a very similar-looking blur by the end of the News Broadcast.
She hoped no-one noticed, but alas her Producer had. He asked her what her problem was, and again she had to lie, ‘sorry, I felt a bit tired. It won’t happen again. I promise.’ Because she was Nancy Woods, she got away with it for the night, but she had to find some way to get around the problem without being noticed. Perhaps she could just have memorised the autocue instead, using it as an extremely fuzzy guide in case she forgot the running order. Her life had just become much more complex, trying to memorise everything, read what she couldn’t, have little restful peeps through her strong glasses and not be noticed doing any of it. At least when she got home she could switch glasses and relax.
Of course her eyes were far from keen on all this, and additionally her eyes became more hyperopic over the course of the next eighteen months. It just got harder and harder to see anything put in front of her, whether far away or especially close up. She was getting pretty well stressed by all of this, so when she went to the optician and found she needed a dioptre added to her full script glasses, she asked for one and a half to be added to her weaker specs. Her optician said nothing but smiled to himself. Her Producer wasn’t delighted by her new plus eight lenses, saying they spoilt the way she looked. She simply went back to reading the news as before, now able to read into the distance rather better than before with the weakened specs.
Over the next three years Nancy cunningly added a little more every so often to her reduced-power specs, until she was forty; by now a lovely statuesque woman in blobby-eggy plus 13 lenses, avoiding neatly the sudden jump in power and eye magnification that would have made her Producer shove her unceremoniously into the backroom, but finally reaching parity with her normal-power glasses, and hence allowing her to dispense with the weaker pairs. And of course, the fans kept writing, telling her how lovely she looked, with her much enlarged, illuminated eyes blinking behind her thick lenses.