Catching Up

My wife and I just bought a new TV. We seem to do this every seven years, but this time it was not due to the old set moving on to the great recycle centre in the sky (or the amenity tip). What prompted this purchase was the need for a larger screen.

We have always lived in small flats (and more to the point, had good eyesight) so we never needed a large TV. Our first was what I would term mid-sized. This was when we were first married—in 2002—back in the day when televisions contained a mammoth cathode ray tube and weighed a ton. I still recall walking home from the shop with it—a distance of two-thirds of a mile—and just about making it.

Seven years later, we needed a new one, and to our surprise there were none to be found. None like our old one, at any rate. What they did have were flat screens that were clearly not fitted with cathode ray tubes, and which required something called a digi-box. We walked away with a 24-inch rectangle that weight about as much as a Betamax, and a digi-box that weighed even less, making the trip home less arduous than I had imagined. The TV was pretty dumb, so the Digi-Box did the heavy lifting. That was where our 145 channels resided, along with the TV schedule and all the things we recorded for later viewing. (I am still in the habit of saying, “let’s tape” something or other; old habits and all that.)

Seven years later, the remote for the digi-box stopped working. I tried everything—changing the batteries, taking the batteries out and putting them back in again in a different order, banging it against the coffee table—but nothing worked. The problem was, without the remote, we couldn’t power up the digi-box, and without the digi-box, the TV was useless. So, we went out and bought new ones.

It was pretty much an even swap—digi for digi, 24-inch TV for 24-inch TV—although the salesperson kept talking about HD and HHD and pixels and other things we couldn’t understand. We weren’t interested; we just took the units home, set them up and carried on.

At that time, we were living in the town centre, so getting rid of the old—and, one might suppose, perfectly fine TV and digi-box—wasn’t the queuing-at-the-local-tip hassle it might have been. All we had to do was take them down to the secure, locked garage attached to our secure, locked block of flats, put them next to our secure parking space, and in an hour or so, someone stole them. Problem solved. (This was how we got rid of most of our junk, rather than take it down to the tip.)

Seven years later (that would be yesterday) we finally got tired of squinting at the telly and decided we needed something bigger, so we went out and bought a 32-inch model. We had thought about getting a new digi-box, as well, figuring that they might have benefited from improved technology over the intervening years. Turns out, they had: digi-boxes are, apparently, all but redundant now. The telly itself does everything the digi-box used to do, and more. The only thing it does not do is record programs, but the inclusion of Freeview, iPlayer, YouTube, Channel 4, etc., as well as the ability to watch shows that have already played, or are yet to play (“press RED now to view ALL episodes” while I am watching the first instalment of a 4-part series), means you really don’t need to record anything to save it for later.

So, life has become simpler and, uncharacteristically, better: two devices are now one, the screen is that much bigger, handy features are still being discovered, the TV boots up in three seconds (I counted; the other one took 45 seconds to boot up—I counted) and we only need a single remote.

Everything would be grand if I could get rid of the old TV and digi-box by just putting them out by my parking space.