Television
Seeing blue
Martyn Harris
The men from Cable London arrived this week to drill a hole in our garden wall: our magic doorway from the sleepy hamlet of BBC and ITV out into the bright lights of the global village — the bellowing, flash- ing, gesticulating electronic marketplace of 30-channel television, selling everything from Joan Rivers to porn, to Islamic theol- ogy to porn, to European truck racing to porn, to. . . .
`Would you like to be tuned into the, ah, adult channel?' our engineer inquired, with a positively Jeevesian delicacy. And we har- rumphed and prodded the carpet with our toes and said casually, ah, well, um, yes, perhaps it wouldn't do any harm and could be quite amusing and so on.
Everyone went for the adult channel, according to our engineer, whose name was Andy and who wore a bunch of keys clipped to his belt. Teachers, vicars, police- men, doctors: they all say they want cable for the nature programmes and the movies and the sport and the religion and for CNN, but Andy's hardly closed the garden gate behind him before they're all tuning in to Blue Mink Bikinis and Insatiable Ingrid. `I'd say 50 per cent of the service calls we get are about the adult channel,' he told us cheerfully. And probably it was the itali- cised squeamishnness of the word adult which made us feel about eleven, and drill our toes into the carpet again and say `um' and 'harrumph' and 'Well, of course, in our case it is for work, you understand?'
As it turned out, Andy couldn't get any cable channels at all on our set, so he left us with the original four — rather snowier than before — and set off to see about something called the SPS switch.
Four days later another engineer called Dave with a bigger bunch of keys arrived, and tuned us into 30 cable channels. They were all rather snowy and seemed to be showing nothing much but obscure sports and ancient Dirk Bogarde movies. In a spirit of casual amusement we may have glanced at the adult channel in passing, but the only thing showing was the initials HVC in lurid red, and before we could stop him Dave had closed the garden gate behind him.
Some time later we were glancing casual- ly and amusedly at something on HVC called Electric Blue, which was the most awful tosh, featuring a lot of naked women and a man in a silver lurex suit telling jokes. 'How does Snow White make love to Pinocchio?' he asked. 'She sits on his face and gets him to tell her lies.' We had been trying to decide whether to turn it off for several hours, when the decision was made for us by all 30 channels disappearing at once. We called Cable London but there was no answer, and the operator told us they had a Mercury phone line, which was carried on the same cable as the TV. The door to the electronic village was slammed in our faces; there was no keyhole; and more, apparently, did not just mean worse: it meant nothing at all.
So we went out to a film, and the next day I reconnected the good old TV aerial and retuned the set, and taped a couple of programmes to review. And then I sat down to do my Spectator column and found I had a blank tape, because Dave or Andy had changed the video channel from 8 to 9, which meant I had been recording an empty band of ether.
So the only television programme I man- aged to see in the last four days was Kafi's Story (Channel 4, 11 p.m., Monday), which was all about this nice Sudanese lad who wanted to buy a dress for the girl he loves. And he decided to leave the sleepy little village where he lived and head off for the bellowing, flashing, gesticulating market- places of big-city Khartoum, and I sat on the edge of my sofa sending telepathic messages: 'Don't do it, Kafi. Don't do it.'
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