TELLY SPAGHETTI

One of the side-issues involved in the (hopefully) de-rodenting of our living space was the sudden need to sort out the dusty old spaghetti junction of wiring behind the TV set and try and make some sense of the ridiculous amount of wires that seemed to have accumulated through the years as various bits and pieces got added to the basic telly in order to get it to function in the bright new electronic-heavy world which we've created for ourselves.

Does anyone now remember the days when you just shoved an aerial into the back, plugged it in, and switched in on, and there you were, watching telly…? No…?

And in those days, setting up a telly was a proper job and everything, and the man from D.E.R. (in our case) used to come along and fix it when it went wrong.

Not now, though. Nowadays there are so many boxes attached to the telly that it looks not unlike those pictures that you sometimes see of the room-sized computers that took men to the moon, and you sometimes feel that you need a PhD in "Young Persons' Interests" just to sit down and not want to watch the news.

And we've not even got a complicated set-up. There is no Sky, BT or Virgin box, no satellite, and nothing in the way of games consoles adding to the limited numberer of ports on our perfectly reasonably sized TV set, so God only knows how people manage who have got all of those sorts of things as well.

Now, you need to understand that we do seem to have a rather peculiar set up, given that all of our limited number of channels still arrive at our telly via the aerial thanks to the "second class" version of Freeview that we receive hereabouts thanks to our fairly limited relay transmitter.

To be honest, we find the sixteen (or so) channels that it gives us far more than enough, but other people still seem to find this limited number fairly odd, even if they still only end upo watching the same half dozen that we do.

More choice, you see, doesn't necessarily mean that you want to watch any of it. Strangely, when the wind is blowing the TV does try to tell us that it has found more channels, but, if we accidentally "Okay" them they all either evaporate, or freeze after no more than a few seconds, and, on the next storm less night, they've all vanished again.

Until the next time.

So, getting back to the back of our ridiculously under-equipped telly, first the aerial wire goes to the videotape recorder (yes, folks…I've still got one of those plumbed in…) from which it travels to the DVR and, from there, a third connector carries the signal on to the TV itself.

Power leads from each of these boxes, and then SCART leads in and out of everything are also lolling around, including all of the ones from the older DVD Player which is also still wired into this mad labyrinth somewhere along the line, and tangled up with all of that lot, we also need to add into the mix the leads which are the various wires connecting the phone line to the outside world, the Broadband Hub, and the power lead for the Broadband Hub, all of which need to be within a wire's length of the place the aerial enters the house, and the telephone connection box.

Then, when you look at the back of the telly itself, you've got two or three AV Inputs, plus another connector for the Smartypants device, and another for Analogue input, as well as other sockets for various SD Cards and the like, and, as I mentioned, we don't even own one of those Games Consoles that other people seem to find so very vital to their particular existences, all of which you have to try to remember the ins and outs of as you pull them all out for a bit of a dust.

Taking a picture helps, I find...

Then you discover some odd anomalies, like that strange fact that the HDMI cable - the one that connects the TV set to the so-called "Smart" box which is about two feet away from it - is about five meters long and, as you try to wrestle with that, you might also find that one of the cheap and nasty SCART leads seemed to be knackered and you might have to run around upstairs and dig out another one that you vaguely remember having put somewhere at some point in the far and distant past when you bought a pack of two of them for no very good reason other than the fact that they were cheap and nasty....

Typically, as I was right in the middle of wrestling with all of this like Indiana Jones in the Well of Souls, the phone rang  all this and, for once, instead of being yet another recorded message about a boiler that I don't want, it turned out to be a real person who actually wanted to have a reasonably long conversation with me.

Twenty minutes or so of conversation later, and I hadn't quite managed to remember how to put it all back together, although I did finally manage to get it all sorted out without causing my forehead to bleed too much.

Of course, with the building work due to resume early on in the New Year, pretty soon I'm going to have to unplug it all and relocate the whole lot somewhere else, so that, much like this Blog posting I fear, might all have turned out to be a bit of a waste of time.