The new television

After a week or so of humming and hahing and generally faffing around, I finally did it: I decided on a new television set and placed an order. My choice, in the end, was not one that I had been considering earlier but a a model with a slightly larger screen (I had made a mistake about the screen size of our old set) but without an Ipod dock or USB port. All this meant that the model I chose was actually cheaper than the others I had been considering. True to their word, the company delivered the day after I placed my order.

It was not until the following day that I could unpack the set and try to get it set up. I made a careful note of which lead went where, but since there were only the aerial lead and a scart lead that wasn't very difficult, even for me. One of the plus points about this particular set was that it had an automatic tuning facility, so I followed the instructions most carefully and pressed the button on the remote control. Problem number one: we can't get Freeview here although the tv has it built in. In my naivety I had assumed that because this was built in, I would be able to receive all those wonderful channels broadcasting programmes that I don't want to watch. Not so, I discovered. Our local transmitter has to be set up to broadcast all those channels in digital format and that won't happen until 2012. Oh well, tell the set to tune in to the analogue stations. Although there are actually five analogue channels, we can only receive four. But here comes problem number 2: the auto tuning facility can only find three channels, and none of those has a watchable picture. OK, let's try manual tuning. No better.

Oh well, we can at least watch through the cable and the picture on the LCD screen is so much better that on our old set. Perhaps I can find some sort of signal booster so that we can also receive the analogue broadcasts. There is a good reason for wanting that, but that's another story.