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May 1st   2006
“Bugger all on the telly again.â€
The Trouble looks up from her magazine. “So why don’t you switch it off ? Instead of hopping from channel to channel all the time? That remote doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going.â€
“It’s going. On the tip with the telly if they don’t start putting something decent on.â€
“You said that last week but you keep watching it.â€
“Only in the way that Captain Bligh scanned the horizon when he was cast adrift on an open boat; in the hope that if I keep looking one day I’ll finally sight land.â€
“There’s plenty of land to be seen already if you’d look properly.â€
The Shakespeare in me emerged. “What land is this you speak of?â€
“Well there’s The Royal.â€
At first I thought The Trouble meant a documentary about Prince Charles or one of his dodgy offspring, then I realised she meant the hospital thing on Sunday Nights,
a soapish drama whose only redeeming feature is the sixties music that punctuates the scenes. “The Royal?†I said. “The Royal isn’t land. Or if it is it’s a swamp. I wish it was a swamp then Wendy Craig might fall in it and be sucked under, I saw quite enough of her in fucking Butterflies.â€
“Fucking Butterflies? Wasn’t that one of David Attenborough’s?â€
“Bill Oddie I think.â€
“He’s never off the box these days, is he.â€
“He should be in a box. With Wendy Craig.â€
“Oh I quite like him.â€
“He’s a self-satisfied little prick. Like Noel Edmonds.â€
“Don’t you like anybody on the television?â€
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t mind one of the newsreaders.†I don’t, I was lying, I don’t like any of them, especially Trevor McDonald, the lot of them would be knackered without the autocue, but I want to keep the conversation going.
Television hasn’t killed the art of conversation in our house. It fuels it.