We didn’t have TV until I was about 12 or 13. I hope no kids are reading this as that’d scare the living daylights out of them.
An aunt got one of those new fangled coloured TVs and gave us her old black and white. Such excitement. It was like Christmas. Probably because it was Christmas.
The snag was we didn’t have a spare socket. To the rescue rode my uncle. (No messing - he had a bike). A table was pulled to the middle of the floor and the set was plugged into the light fitting. It worked fine and we all huddled around to watch a war movie. It may have been called Mother Goose. I’m not sure. Maybe that was just the call-sign used by the pilot of the lead plane. It’s all I remember.
It wasn’t until the new year my uncle returned and wired up an extra socket. All over Christmas, the auld fella would sit with just the flickering light of the TV and the fire, grumbling as he tried to read his paper.
Up until then, I had been dabbling in the drug that is TV. And like all addicts, I was creative in getting my fix. An old man down the road had one and it put it on on Sunday afternoons to watch the big game from Croke Park. I didn’t mind the hurling but loathed the football, yet I’d sit through it feigning excitement and making appropriate comments and noises. Once the game was over, he’d put the kettle on and produce the biscuits and buns. Ah shur, leave it on, I’d suggest. There might be something else good coming up. It was always Tarzan after the game and I knew it. He did too I suppose and just played along. He wanted the company, I wanted the telly.
That was years ago. Months ago I turned off my own TV and haven’t turned it on since. I don’t know how for long. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t even notice I’d kicked the habit until I was asked if I’d seen such-and-such.
If I get rid of it altogether by year end I won’t have to renew my license come January. That’s appealing. The license itself is appalling. All that money for RTÉ and they just show rubbish. They don’t even have Tarzan any more for crisake! Even the ads they run reminding us we need a license are rubbish. One had three Irish twenty some things pretending they couldn’t speak English. The inspector responds in Polish and Chinese, and reminds the guy who says he’s from Barbados, that English is spoken there. The funny thing is, no Polish person can understand what the actor’s saying - it’s definitely not Polish.
If I hold onto it, it will be to watch DVDs. I can do that on my computer but the quality is not the same. I’ll see how things go during the feathers - there are always DVDs then, and time to watch them. And some worth viewing a second time weeks later.
Yeah, I may hold onto it just for that. What’s bugging me though, is I’d have kicked the habit, yet I’d still be paying for the drugs.
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