Prince Philip is right about modern television sets. He says they are poorly designed. If one needs to adjust one’s set, he told a television interviewer, one has to get down on all fours with magnifying glass, instruction manual, and a torch between one’s teeth, and virtually make love to the thing. He also has a horror of remote controls. The smallness and mysteriousness of the symbols irritate him. For keen-eyed ten-year-old children, he says, they are fine. But for elderly dukes they are a maddening, unfathomable mystery.
I wonder whether he’s been on all fours on the carpet with a torch between his teeth because he and Her Majesty the Queen have gone digital. We have down here in the West Country. It’s been a protracted and confusing business. Helpful pamphlets, dropped through our letterboxes just after Christmas, warned us about the change from an analogue to digital TV signal well in advance.
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