‘Please, please, do not touch the Sky cables.’ That was my unequivocal instruction to the builder as he set about repainting my living room. My furniture was piled in the centre of the floor covered with dustsheets. But poking out from the dust sheets were the wires coming from the TV, still connected to the Sky box, from which a long line of white cable wended its way to the wall.
‘But you can reconnect them,’ he tried to reason with me. ‘You can pull the wires out and put them back in.’ I told him to get a grip of himself. This was crazy talk. Once you mess with Sky cables, you are on the road to perdition.
Yes, of course, disconnecting the television ought to be a simple matter. I can certainly remember that when I was a child we unplugged the telly often and with gay abandon.
But times have moved on. Televisions nowadays are not so much plugged into the wall as hooked up to The Matrix. They have more wires coming out of them than Keanu Reeves in his pod when the machines were harvesting his bioelectrical energy. In fact, I’m fairly sure you could have tidied the cables around Reeves. There’s absolutely no chance of tidying the cables around my TV.
Yes, it would be simpler to get myself transported to a simulated parallel life than to unplug my television from a Sky box and plug it back in again.
I live in fear of the wretched contraption coming unstuck. Once, the rabbit ate the cables and I panicked so much I ended up calling one of those cowboy satellite repair firms who charged me £560 to fix them.
Since then I’ve been tiptoeing around the TV set like it is a holy ark. Imagine my horror, therefore, when I got home to find that in the centre of the newly painted living room was the Sky box with its main cable hanging out the back.
I tried to put it back in but I might as well have tried to mend a severed wrist artery.
I called Sky desperate for reassurance but all I got was a list of ‘options’, none of which encompassed my needs. There was no ‘Press 2 for someone nice to tell you how to stick the big white cable back in the right socket while you hyperventilate into a brown paper bag.’
So I pressed 2 for ‘TV not working?’ which was an understatement. I wasn’t anywhere near in a good enough position to know whether the TV was working or not.
‘The wires’s out the back! The wires’s out the back!’ was what I wanted to shout at whoever answered the phone, but of course I couldn’t scream at the girl in New Delhi.
‘It will go back in, won’t it?’ I begged her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t fix the television over the phone, ma’am.’ ‘But you must know something,’ I moaned. ‘The big fat white cable, you know the one, surely? Just tell me, will it go back in? Will it?’
She was very calm. And when she said an engineer could come two days later I nearly wept with joy. It would be £60, but when you’re used to paying nearly £600 you don’t quibble.
And seeing as an engineer was coming, I decided to take the opportunity to buy the new plasma screen I had been promising myself for years but had been too frightened of. This way, I could get it installed by an expert.
When he arrived, he was about 18 years old. He strode into my living room, grabbed the cable, stuck it in the back of the box and said, ‘That’s it.’
Not for me, it wasn’t. ‘Please go on.’ I instructed him. ‘With what?’ he said. ‘With making the telly work.’
He shrugged, picked up the remote and pressed a button. A million channels appeared by magic. But as he made for the door, I tried to stop him.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know something is going to go wrong the minute you leave so…can you stay for a bit?’ He stared at me with real fear in his eyes, as if I was Kathy Bates in Misery. Suddenly, I felt desperate. I wanted to tell him, ‘Please stay. You could be happy here. We could make a go of it, you and I.’
But I didn’t. I let him go. I watched his little van disappear. And as soon as he was gone, I realised what was wrong. He had turned the television back off again. And I had no idea which button he had pressed to get it to come on. I pressed everything on the remote but I couldn’t make it work. I should have kidnapped him.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments