At long last it has happened! A crack squad from Duck, Bun and Winker (Bath's top media firm) has fitted up an aerial on the rear end of our yellow coalhouse roof. At first there ws no picture - it was completely zilch. All you could see on the screen was a misty blur of spinning dots and dancing shadows. Now and again something reminiscent of one of the Sliley's faces would start poking out its tongue and wriggling its ears. And then, with the crack media squad from Duck, Bun and Winker about to call it a day there was a shout of 'ignition!' and the picture became crystal clear. There on the screen in all her radiant splendour was someone really famous called Lady Isobel Barnett.
The television set fills up a small fragment of the emptiness that my brother's absence has left behind. No one mentions this out loud, although we all can feel it. There is even a guilty feeling about not having had a television when he was around. the advertisements should say something like: "Buy a TV and fill that existentialist void!"
When a television aerial is being hoisted into place you can tell within a few seconds whether it can pick up both the ITV and BBC channels or only a measly one. So in the case of the areial on out yellow coalhouse roof there was absolutely no way the Slileys were going to resist coming out with the inevitable jibe. "What! Only BBC!" one of the Slileys said. Impossible to deny of course. We could hardly say "It is the latest mega aerial from the States - it looks like a clapped out BBC only aerial but in fact can pick up signals from every TV station on the planet!" The leap from being a no television prefab to a one channel television prefab might have been a giant one step for us. But in a consumer society the goalposts keep on moving and unless you can pick up both channels you are not real players in the game.
And there is no point in saying something like "Those ITV advertisements are a Trojan Horse for the acceleration of the move towards the creation of a more acquisitive capitalist culture." (Unless, that is, you have an urge to get your head kicked in).
We are not going to let our one TV channel sweep all before it. When darkness falls you cannot beat holding a cup of hot cocoa and roving around the wireless stations of the world! The other night we stumbled across a talk being given by a brash and super-confident American tycoon. It was about the qualities needed to achieve success in the fast-moving world of business wheeler-dealing. His words penetrated the easy-going languor of our relaxed sitting-room sanctum like a cool icicle of unwelcome realism.
"Your listeners should remember one thing" said the brash and super-confident American tycoon. (There was then a brief pause which you could tell was deliberately designed to heighten the impact of the imminent message. What a salesman this guy was!)

"Everything in this life is based on the intelligent pursuit of self-interest!"

Not in this prefab, buster!