Goodbye to my gogglebox (From Bournemouth Echo)

Goodbye to my gogglebox

7:00pm Wednesday 8th July 2009

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AT some time in the next three years, I’m going to have to part company with an old friend.

As you will probably be aware, 2012 brings the event officially called the Digital Switchover. In many households, however, that date is called The Day The Government Makes Your Portable Telly Stop Working.

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It means that lots of people who were perfectly happy with their old analogue TV set and four or five TV channels will join the multi-channel revolution whether they want to or not.

It also means that while one arm of government is quite rightly telling us to save energy and not leave appliances on standby all the time, another arm of government will make everybody buy digital TV receivers which have to be left on standby all night.

But for me, it will mean a sad farewell to my old Pye colour portable, which I acquired second hand 20 years ago and which shows no signs of packing up. You can’t hook a digital receiver to it, so it will go to its eternal rest at the civic tip. There is surely no more profound or tender relationship than that between a film anorak and their TV set. I acquired this one in my last year of university, and spent many happy evenings watching it into the early hours, occasionally twiddling the aerial to pick up another ITV region for a different choice of Friday night horror movie.

It was one of a string of TV sets that I’ve been fondly attached to over the years. In the 1970s, our family got ours from Radio Rentals, which meant you could have a succession of different models, and I can remember almost all of them.

There was the first colour one, on which we thrilled to Barnaby The Bear because it was so, well, colourful. Then there was the one in a wooden cabinet with the sliding door on the front. It sounds a bit naff today, but it meant switching on your set resembled the unveiling of a painting, and it certainly gave a sense of occasion to watching The Magic Roundabout.

There was the first remote control one, whose channels could be changed from the remote, or, for some reason, by rattling a big bottle of coins which we kept on the sideboard.

There was another remote control set whose volume would suddenly switch up and down alarmingly as though the set were possessed by a TV-watching demon.

And there was the coin-operated TV. Anybody remember those? They were designed to give you an easy way of putting aside money for the TV rental, and ours would invariably shut down whenever Kojak was leading a line of squad cars screeching around the corner to catch the murderer. I think we also had a coin-fed electric meter at the time, so it was amazing we ever found out who killed anyone.

People often used to say to kids in the 1970s: “Why don’t you switch off the telly and go outside? You’ll get square eyes.” They probably had a point. And if today’s kids don’t switch off the TV and get some fresh air, they will probably get 16:9 anamorphic widescreen eyes in high definition.

I’m going to give that subject some serious thought just as soon as I’m through raging at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for killing my old friend.

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