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1 hour ago
4
Fourteen years ago, I received a text from my eldest son claiming he’d just found the TV face down on the sitting room floor, destroyed. I didn’t entirely buy his theory about the dogs being responsible – I discovered a football lying suspiciously near the crime scene – but it was a problem I needed to solve before my wife returned from a business trip.
That was the last time I bought a new television. It still works, but it’s small by today’s standards, to the extent that it’s impossible to read the contents of a ransom note held by a detective in a drama. As TVs have expanded, the ransom notes have got smaller; I often have to pause the programme, get up and put my nose to the screen.
On a Monday afternoon I come in from my office shed to find the middle one typing furiously on his laptop, with my wife looking on.
“Show Dad,” she says.
“What?” I say.
“Your broadband and TV package is ending,” he says.
“Yeah, I think I got an email,” I say.
“Next month your bill goes up by like, 50%,” he says. He turns his screen to show me. He wants me to be shocked by the new number, but I’m too busy being shocked by the old number.
“How long have I been paying that?” I say.
“Two years,” he says.
“Can I cancel the contract?” I say.
“The contract is over,” he says.
“You have to explain it very slowly to him,” my wife says.
The middle one says we can renew the contract for the same price, or threaten to quit and hope they make us a better offer. “Or,” he says, “you can switch to broadband only, buy a smart TV like everyone else and save 70 quid a month.”
“A new TV?” I say. “Will it be big enough to read ransom notes?”
“I don’t know what that means,” he says.
Armed with our new project, we all repair to the living room. The middle one begins the tiresome process of extricating us from our present deal, progressing from chatbot to chat human to chat human’s supervisor. My wife starts looking at televisions. I take a tape measure to the alcove between the chimney breast and the wall, where our present TV resides.
“Here’s a nice one,” my wife says. “Highly recommended, 50 inches.”
“Fifty inches?” I say, extending the tape measure. “Far too big.”
“Not that way,” says the middle one, looking up. “It’s 50 inches diagonally.”
“What use is that to me?” I say. “I’m measuring across!”
“All tellies are measured diagonally,” he says.
“Still?” I say.
“What do you mean, still?” he says.
Here’s what I mean: the first cathode ray tube TV screens were round, so the size of the display was naturally expressed as the diameter. When the round screen was masked in a rectangular box, the diameter was also the diagonal. And the convention persisted for decades because, from a marketing standpoint, it made screens sound bigger than they were.
“But now it’s like, TVs are huge – who cares?” I say.
“Measuring diagonally is childish.”
“I’m afraid your father’s gone mad,” my wife says.
“On the contrary,” I say. “I’m the only sane one left.”
To demonstrate my sanity, I use a plank from the garden to mark off the exact horizontal capacity of the alcove at TV height: 1,113mm. Then, looking up the listed dimensions of various 50in tellies, I note that they actually vary in total width by up to 8mm.
“Why do we care about 8mm?” my wife says.
“Because,” I say, “as my research shows, 40% of the most highly recommended 50in TVs will not fit in that gap.”
“You must be very pleased,” she says, leaving the room. The middle one, I notice, has already gone.
“I am pleased,” I say, to no one.
The pall I’ve managed to cast over the whole project persists even after our new broadband-only contract arrives by email. It still hasn’t lifted the next afternoon when, all alone, I unbox our new TV and slide it gently into place, with barely a millimetre to spare either side.
I plug it in and follow the setup process. Then, after double-checking to make sure no one is home, I scroll through the guide in search of a programme in which someone is kidnapped for ransom.
