The Digital Age

In our house I refer to it as the mosaic age. This is because when I can find a channel that actually works, it is displayed as a pixelated mish mash resembling a psychedelic mosaic, accompanied by a stuttering of sound bites which may or may not belong to the programme , who knows , you can't make out enough of the picture to know what the hell is going on anyway.

We have a telly in the bedroom. Nothing posh but at least flat, unlike the dinosaur sitting in the living room which I'll be donating to the Design Museum before long as one of those laughably enormous pieces of equipment that people actually used to watch in the 80's.

So, my smallish , flattish telly sits in our wardrobe which glows like a scene from Encounters of a Close Kind when the door is shut, as I can't find the button to turn off the luminous blue glow that emanates from within. It  comes with a remote ( notice omission of the second word 'control' - a complete oxymoron ) , just the one, thank God, which you press at random in an attempt to locate a channel. There are about thirty something channels, apparently, but none of them actually work. When I say 'work' I mean display a picture which you can recognise in synch to a soundtrack which doesn't sound like the recipient of a recent tracheotomy.

So here I am at bedtime trying in desperation to find something, anything to watch. Eventually I narrow down the thirty something ( more like twenty something actually, as at least a dozen are named salubriously along the lines Boobs 'n' Tits or Dave +1 . I'm sure just plain Dave without the 1+ would be bad enough but in case the neanderthals watching it first time around couldn't quite decipher any words longer than one syllable , they clearly needed another dose but then it was probably all pictures of cars and boobs and gadgets anyway so who'd need words ) to just one solitary channel. So much for choice.

So here I am at nearly midnight watching a couple of ponces fannying around in Sicily, gushing about the lemonyness ( yes that's actually what they said and it had 4 syllables) of a lemon sorbet. It got worse , a lot worse. They then went to watch a Good Friday parade from the local church from which a weeping Madonna icon was held head high, borne through the cobbled streets, by costumed locals in celebration of the imminent resurrection of Christ. Gosh , the gushing continued , this is just so ... so .... so Sicilian . Well yes , that may have been because they were in Sicily.

Enough. One last press of the remote and the picture thankfully reduced to the size of a pin prick of light. Silence is golden and not at all pixelated.