GOGGLE BOX TV

It’s mind goggling. There was a time when TV was only alive and kicking a few hours a day. Or it might be if it weren’t still true today.

You see the same old films your granddad saw in black and white, which should have been blue, because they’re all about water: The Cruel Sea, Bridge on the River Kwai, Sink the Bismarck! Wet, wet, wet.

And too many programs these days are about watching paint dry: tarting up old slums, then fobbing them off on poor witless fools. But students don’t complain.

Because charity begins at home. Every morning, the TV charity industry armbends its way into our homes to con us into coughing up donations. Don’t get me wrong, some of their hearts are in the right place. It’s just that far too often, their heads are right up their bums.

It sounded great when one charity sent 6 fishing trawlers to an African village, and it might have been. Except there were no fishermen, and the remote, inland lake dried up years ago.

Another TV appeal was in aid of extinct wolves in Scotland. Why, to give them a decent burial? No, they’re reintroducing these wolves from a German forest, where the Huns pronounce W as V. So if you go down to the woods tonight, you’re in for a big vuff! vuff! There’s nae way Scotch Collie dogs will stand for it!

So what’s on in tomorrow’s goggle box world? Well TV is set to jump out of its box and into three-dimensional holograms, with lasers projecting the show like a naff aurora over your fireside rug. So you get a bit-part in the action.

Imagine: you’re reading Telly Times on the loo, when a pack of pups escape from the rasclart advert, then burst in and chase all the bog rolls downstairs. Next comes Peter Kay, Amarillo-marching out of his hologram and into your kitchen; tripping over the cat and ending up face down in your tatty pie.

Finally, that woman in ‘Psycho’ is having her fateful shower. Your dirty Uncle Dennis leaps up from the couch and into this ‘lectronic mirage to cover her nakedness and save her from Alfred Hiccup’s manipulation. There’s shower gel everywhere; it fuses the telly, douses the coal fire and finally cools your Uncle’s ardour. And that’s it: cue Epilogue.

© Mike Atkinson