Why I Shouldn’t Make Household Decisions

Being an overworked occasional TV reviewer for esteemed celebrity website HecklerSpray and spending most Sundays unwilling to do anything more strenuous than sitting still, I spend a lot of time working out my eye muscles in front of the idiot’s lantern. The haunted fishtank. The bloody telly.

Growing up, there were four channels and you jolly well had to like it. Missing a program meant scouring the TV listings for a late night repeat – usually signed for the deaf (do they ever sleep?) – and programming the 25 digit VideoPlus number in to watch it. And it was terrible when everyone else was discussing something the next day, and you’d only gone and missed it.

Now though, with Sky dishes lining the council estates of the country, there’s hundreds and hundreds of channels available, ranging from popular – BBC1, Channel 4 – to minority interests like Psychic TV, Extreme Sports and Channel 5. Even ITV, who struggle to make ITV1 watchable have four different channels. What can they possibly show that necessitates four channels? Oh – repeats of old series. A bit like UK Gold. Only, in that inimitable ITV way, worse.

I took the plunge recently, after deciding that the picture quality I’d been used to for the past forever was all of a sudden not good enough, to join the HD revolution. Three years after it became a revolution, but every revolution needs someone standing at the back cheering long after the barriers have been broken down. And I’m nothing if not someone who quietly waits to see what everyone else thinks before going “yay, woo” along with the crowd.

And so the SkyHD man will be coming this weekend, hopefully not in a repeat of the hilarious antics when the SkyNotHD man didn’t turn up and Sky cancelled the order because why not? Those three days off work weren’t wasted, anyway. And my hopes weren’t built up when the people across the road had Sky installed when I thought he’d be doing mine so I was stood checking the window every five minutes, peeking up like an agitated meerkat.

This time everything is running smoothly, except one small mistake that is going to cost me a lot of money.

They got my phone number a bit wrong.

Not completely wrong, just a couple of digits wrong. Which meant I had to phone them up and fight through the menu system to get it corrected. When you confirm your account details with them, they have automated voice recognition, which asks you for your account number and then confirms it back to you in a robotic voice, like Stephen Hawking playing at copycats.

After years of dealing with useless callcentre people, it was shocking to talk to someone who was helpful and, er, fixed it in seconds. This is the bit where it gets expensive. Because he was polite, understandable and nice, I quite happily listened to how much extra it would cost me to have all the nice shiny new channels. Not much extra. Not when you consider all the channels. Never mind that I have – and pay for – hundreds of them already, 95% of which never get watched, this is Premium Content. The best of the best. Movies! 10 High Definition movies on RIGHT NOW!

Actually, the best bit of this was when I was given my new PIN, so I can watch 18 rated films during the day. Yeah, get me. Told to get a bit of paper and write it down. Very deliberately and slowly, the PIN gets read out to me “One… two…” I can see where this is going “three… four.” Cool, should be just about able to remember that.

Take away the 10 hours a day I spend at work, the 8 hours sleep I get and the hour of rushing around in the morning trying to make lunch, have a shower and feed the rabbit all at the same time, it doesn’t leave a lot of time to watch these channels. But I might.

And that’s why I have every channel available and give Sky the best part of £55 a month. Because I’m a sucker and shouldn’t be allowed to talk to anybody ever.