what do you do?

don’t you love it when you work on a piece for a new market you’re hoping to crack and at first they’re kind of interested but then it goes totally unacknowledged and completely unwanted so that months and months and months and months later you finally realise it ain’t never gonna be published? no? me neither. it does give me blog material though, so here is one such piece for your delectation: enjoy/feel a bit sorry for me after you’ve read it!

The Tyranny of Top-Up TV

Who decides what you watch on TV? Your kids, your partner, maybe even (lucky!) you?

In my house an inanimate object is all-powerful: the Top Up TV box, designed to provide digital TV and “the best of satellite” in one affordable package, runs rampant. It deletes programmes it deems unsuitable, chooses not to record those it despises and always sends cheerful messages asking me to confirm that the changes it’s made to my viewing plans are ‘OK’. Where’s the option that says ‘No, it’s most definitely NOT OK, you’re really pushing your luck!’?

This small black box has big ideas. It’s too good for reality TV: during every episode of The Apprentice it froze for at least two minutes, always at the moment of maximum tension. And Any Dream Will Do? sent it into sputters of righteous indignation. Not once in three months would Top Up TV record this programme, despite being instructed and even begged to do so. More frustrating than not recording a show at all are the times the box plays the cruel trick of recording for a cursory seven minutes before turning itself off. Or records a programme in full but won’t permit it to play. And if I see another flashing message about a programme being declared corrupt “on boot”, my boot will be flying through the TV screen.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this… Top Up TV’s website promised lots of wonderful things, some of which are actually true: for £9.99 a month a selection of satellite TV programmes is downloaded while I sleep. Too bad a disproportionate number of them are about fishing and that series can’t be guaranteed to be in order. I can easily record from any digital channel (when the recorder lets me) and pause live TV for half an hour at a time. The machine’s cheaper than its competitors and can go days without a major problem and sometimes several minutes without a minor one, like needing to flash on and off repeatedly. Plus, I never need buy a TV guide now thanks to the fourteen-day on-screen schedule.

But my TV watching has never been so unpredictable. Not only don’t I know if this box will ever actually follow its instructions, I can’t predict when it will switch itself off and refuse to come back on. Perhaps this could become a new spectator sport: extreme TV.

In my attempts to understand this strange behaviour, I have entertained the thought that my Top Up TV is really a Buddhist sage in digital disguise: teaching me the importance of non-attachment by refusing to record those programmes I’m looking forward to most. Either that or I’m living inside a crazy reality show in which the first Top Up TV box to drive its owner to a nervous breakdown wins.

Mine could definitely be a contender.