No. 22 Remote Control Television

Don’t be fooled. There’s officially bugger all on TV nowadays.

Beneath all the fluff, fanfare, gloss and tinsel, there’s nothing worth prising yourself away from the festering imprint your backside has left in the sofa to switch the television on for. But then, the devilry that is the remote control means you don’t even have to do that.

I fondly recall a time when you not only had to vacate your seat to turn the TV on, but to change the channel too. And we only had three of the swines to choose from. BBC1, BBC2, ITV. Try and imagine that in these enlightened times of couch spuddism.

There’d be uproar, my friend! The civil liberties brigade would be out on the streets protesting the rights of fat lads and the bone idle. Massive fines would be imposed on TV manufacturers failing to supply sufficient remote control access. It would be something akin to ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’… Aha, I feel I may just have coined a phrase worthy of public adoption. Feel free to use it amongst your good selves, whenever the need may arise.

The thing is, before the days of remote controls, there was actually something worth getting out of your seat for. Try my rose-tinted specs for size and reminisce on such gems as Doctor Who; Open All Hours; Tiswas; Minder; The Moomins; The Sweeney; Auf wiedersehen, Pet; A Very British Coup; Only Fools And Horses.

Remember:

Invention of Remote Control = Expansion of Nation’s collective waistline

Nowadays the vast majority of TV is made by idiots for the consumption of idiots, or those too high up the evolutionary scale to notice that their intelligence is being insulted.

Apart from throwing out the occasional exception to this rule – Doctor Who, The Sopranos, Peep Show, Family Guy, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, and a few more – TV is now a desolate wasteland of cheap and nasty exploitative tat; carbon copy costume dramas; ludicrously plotted and ill thought-out soap operas; panel shows, makeovers, and DIY crap. More often than not involving some Z-list micro-celebrity whose 15 minute claim to fame is they once slept at a Travelodge that Beppe from Eastenders had dropped into the week before to ask directions to the Supermarket opening for which he was already twenty minutes late.

And this nonsense is played over and over and over, ad infinitum. Trapped in a continuous loop across an almost limitless number of channels, reducing the brain to mush, muscle to fat, resistance to zero, and causing complete paralysis of the senses.

And we put up with it.

To be perfectly honest (as a man of my standing is never less than), if it wasn’t for the fact we can play DVDs on the television, the only remote control I’d need would be the business end of a house-brick, to turn bleeding thing off once and for all.

Warned.

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