Fourteen years ago, I\u00a0received a text from my eldest son claiming he\u2019d just found the TV face down on the sitting room floor, destroyed. I didn\u2019t entirely buy his theory about the dogs being responsible \u2013 I discovered a\u00a0football lying suspiciously near the crime scene \u2013 but it was a problem I\u00a0needed to solve before my wife returned from a business trip.<\/p>\n
That was the last time I bought a new television. It still works, but it\u2019s small by today\u2019s standards, to the extent that it\u2019s impossible to read the contents of a\u00a0ransom note held by a detective in a\u00a0drama. 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShow Dad,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour broadband and TV package is\u00a0ending,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I think I got an email,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
double quotation markThe middle one begins extricating us from our present deal, progressing from chatbot to chat human to chat human\u2019s supervisor<\/p>\n
\u201cNext month your bill goes up by like, 50%,\u201d he says. He turns his screen to show me. He wants me to be shocked by the new number, but I\u2019m too busy being shocked by the old number.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow long have I been paying that?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo years,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan I cancel the contract?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe contract is over,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to explain it very slowly to him,\u201d my wife says.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cOr,\u201d he says, \u201cyou can switch to broadband only, buy a\u00a0smart TV like everyone else and save\u00a070 quid a month.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA new TV?\u201d I say. \u201cWill it be big enough to read ransom notes?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what that means,\u201d he\u00a0says.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s supervisor. My wife starts looking at televisions. I\u00a0take a tape measure to the alcove between the chimney breast and the wall, where our present TV resides.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere\u2019s a nice one,\u201d my wife says. \u201cHighly recommended, 50 inches.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFifty inches?\u201d I say, extending the tape measure. \u201cFar too big.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot that way,\u201d says the middle one, looking up. \u201cIt\u2019s 50 inches diagonally.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat use is that to me?\u201d I say. \u201cI\u2019m measuring across!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll tellies are measured diagonally,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cStill?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you mean, still?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
double quotation mark\u2018I\u2019m afraid your father\u2019s gone mad,\u2019 my\u00a0wife says. On the\u00a0contrary, I\u2019m the only sane one left<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s 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\u00a0round screen was masked in a\u00a0rectangular box, the diameter was also the diagonal. And the convention persisted for decades because, from a\u00a0marketing standpoint, it made screens sound bigger than they were.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut now it\u2019s like, TVs are huge \u2013 who cares?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cMeasuring diagonally is childish.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m afraid your father\u2019s gone mad,\u201d my wife says.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the contrary,\u201d I say. \u201cI\u2019m the only sane one left.\u201d<\/p>\n
To demonstrate my sanity, I use a \u00a0plank 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do we care about 8mm?\u201d my\u00a0wife says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause,\u201d I say, \u201cas my research shows, 40% of the most highly recommended 50in TVs will not fit in\u00a0that gap.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou must be very pleased,\u201d she says, leaving the room. The middle one, I notice, has already gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am pleased,\u201d I say, to no one.<\/p>\n
The pall I\u2019ve managed to cast over the whole project persists even after our new broadband-only contract arrives by email. It still hasn\u2019t lifted the next afternoon when, all alone, I\u00a0unbox our new TV and slide it gently into place, with barely a millimetre to spare either side.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0programme in which someone is\u00a0kidnapped for ransom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fourteen years ago, I\u00a0received a text from my eldest son claiming he\u2019d just found the TV face down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-753511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}