So. Freeview. It’s A Bit Shit

It’s been about 4 weeks since we ditched the cable TV package and bought a mid range, mid price set top box from Argos. More than enough time for the new system to bed-in and outlive the initial honeymoon period.

Sure we can record one channel while watching another. Sure we can even record two different channels at the same time while watching one of them. Or we can even record stuff while watching stuff we’ve already recorded. And the rather capacious harddrive means we can store entire series and entire film oeuvres and still have room for the odd sitcom or two shoehorned on top.

Long live the great god Technology.

Except the reception is patchy and intermittent. This despite blowing the best part of £200 on a brand spanking new TV aerial and “booster box” – apparently the latter was necessary because our house is in a “slight dip” which is further aggravated by the presence of a 3 storey apartment block a couple of roads away whose sole purpose in life (aside from acting like a Chav hatchery) is to block out the TV signal that legitimately should be ours.

But here’s the thing: the reception seems to go at more or less the same time every night. 8.0pm approaches and the picture pixelates and the sound pops and jumps like that annoying comedian from the 70’s who’s main shtick was to pretend to have a dodgy hearing aid and would thus speak like this: “-llo can y- h- me? I’m h-ing tr-ble w- my h-ing ai-“

Yeah, right, ‘cos the ol’ voicebox is controlled by a device you plug into your ears, isn’t it, you st-pid b-st-d?

We’ve tried turning it off and on. We’ve tried changing channels. We’ve tried blowing onto the box in case, you know, it’s overheated playing back The Sarah Jane Adventures to the kids (well, Rani is a bit of a babe).

But all to no avail.

Reception is scrambled.

So something must be occurring around the same time every night and interfering with our TV reception. My money is on the students next door. I daresay 8pm sees them opening their coffin lids to finally start their day and all logging-on en masse to Windows Messenger and Facebook to see if anybody actually gives a shit about their status (“drank 8 bottles of tiger beer last night am well wasted”).

I can’t think what else it can be.

Either way if my Freeview box can’t cope with a little bit of interference then the great god Technology is dead and buried in my book. I mean, we never had reception problems like this when I was a kid. We only had 3 channels and they all worked fine. The only time the TV would go on the fritz was when a seagull would sit on the TV aerial or there’d be a thunderstorm somewhere in the Birmingham area.

Freeview? What a misnomer. It’s anything but free and half the time you can’t view anything.

Still, at least I can record static and white noise from 2 different TV channels whilst watching a digital snowstorm on a third.

Every cloud, eh?

The Amityville Plumber

Dark forces are at work in my house.

The shadows bend outward from the corners as if stretching, reaching for additional purchase to haul themselves further into the mortal world.

Upstairs in an inexplicably empty room flies seem to multiply unnaturally and mither themselves to the point of insanity against a solitary window that is impossible to open. So many of them, swarming, crawling, buzzing like infernal machines, that they block out the light of the sun.

In fact we sent a priest upstairs to sort that room out with a blessing a couple of weeks ago and he still hasn’t come down. Come to think of it I found his dog collar on the stairs a few days after his arrival and it had teeth marks in it.

And don’t talk to me about our basement.

What basement? Yeah, that’s what I mean. We didn’t have one when we first moved into the house but suddenly we do and it seems to have a strange effect on all who venture into it. Their eyes turn red, their teeth become large and pointy and they start talking in a slightly unhinged but manly baritone... something about the gateway to hell.

Now, either my house is built on the site of an old McDonald’s Drive-thru or something truly nefarious is occurring.

It is the only thing I can think of to explain the sheer impossibility of obtaining any damned contractors to come round and perform the multitude of small jobs that are currently hampering my enjoyment of my family home.

I wrote a while ago about my difficulties in obtaining a plumber. I’ve approached others since then and they have all given me the same excuse: yes, I am interested but can’t come round now to look at the job, I will call you on such and such a day and arrange a visit. Right. So such and such a day arrives and they don’t call so I call them back and get the same excuse repeated to me and the same thing happens yet again.

And then there are the TV aerial installers. I tried to engage one of those too. I left several messages on the company phone. Nobody has rung me back. It’s £159 to have a new aerial installed apparently. Not huge money, I know, but it is the price they have put on it themselves. I’m willing to pay it. But for some reason they don’t want to come round to my house to earn it.

And now I have to engage someone to try and repair our cooker because another sausage-based inferno has put paid to the dials on the fascia and the cooling fan has lost the ability to turn itself off.

My heart balks at the mere thought of having to kick off yet another round of polite enquiries only to be given the finger / the hand / the cold shoulder / the thank you but no thank you / the brush off.

Christ. The only person who comes round regularly and without fail to my house is bloody Wayne the window cleaner. You remember him? Wayne the bloody nutcase, commie hating, Christian platitude spouting, crusade revivalist with a grudge against all western world bankers. Every month he comes round to clean my windows because I’m too much of a coward to tell him to take his chamois and his bucket and his ladder and his hordes of demonic flies and sod off.

Ooh.

Demonic flies.

You don’t think he might be, you know, putting some voodoo on my house or something? Some kind of weird window cleaning juju?

*Gulp*

Anybody know a good priest? Shit. Hold on a minute; I’ve already tried that.

Help!

Aerial Suicide

The UK campaign to upgrade every household in the country to digital TV reception produced its first casualty this morning.

At approximately 3.0 am our – already damaged as the result of a past illicit pigeon-shagging incident – decided that it would rather jump than wait to be pushed. We awoke to the eerie sound of stressed metal screaming as it threw itself off the chimney stack and into the gutter.

Or rather into the guttering.

I guess the fact that we’ve already been watching cable for the last 3 years so have no need to upgrade was little comfort. It knew its days of snowstorm TV reception were numbered. Better by far to descend earthwards in a last self-actualizing bid for glory.

When the rag-and-bone man comes next week the sound of his rusty hunting horn will be a fitting tribute to past services rendered.

Goodbye old friend. We salute you.

Now what’s on Sky One tonight?

Broken TV Aerial

Last night Karen and I suffered the singularly peculiar experience of being woken up at 3am by our TV aerial clanging against itself in the wind.

We noticed it was broken a couple of weeks ago when by chance we forewent the usual televisual hogwash on cable and switched to good old terrestrial telly… and found that the reception on all channels resembled Channel 5 on a good night (international readers of this blog won’t have the foggiest what I’m talking about - let’s all savour the smugness of knowing something that they don’t…).

A quick sojourn out to the front garden revealed that our TV aerial was nigh on snapped in half and dangling down like the guest of honour at a bah-mitzvah.

How such a thing can have occurred when every other TV aerial in the street is flying stiff and correct at the horizontal, I don’t know. My only theory is that our aerial was singled out by an amorous pair of immensely obese pigeons who proceeded to go at it hammer and tongues on our "roof-top antenna love-pad" and wrecked the poor thing to within an inch of it falling off the roof in total embarrassment and disgust.

Now on windy nights our street resounds to the forlorn clanging of multi pronged metal bashing itself against its own up-stand…

…and we’re going to have to pay some poor sap a few hundred pounds to go up on a ladder, fix the bloody thing and wipe it free of pigeon spunk.

Marvellous.