Did you know that they now make telephones that you can carry around in your pockets? Don’t need any wire, let alone an annoying, twisted curly wire. Did you know that? Phones that are also capable of taking photographs, mainly of your genitals, to send to other people? Its incredible. Technology moves so fast that you no longer need to learn ‘cobol’ to use a computer. Wow. Whatever next.

I’ll tell you what’s next.

I just bought a ‘smart’ tv. Ok, everyone else bought one about 6 years ago but not me. Hah, not that old ‘you’re tv’s out of date because its black’n’white’ ruse to try to get me to spend money. No Siree. But eventually, a new tv is what you ‘need’. So it might as well come with as many initials as you can get for the money. HD. HDMI. USB. 3D. Ok, I didn’t want 3d because its stupid but enough acronyms that I had to get a new Sky box to go with it. Because I only watch 2 things on tv: News and Football. BBC and Sky Sports. That’s it. Maybe a bit of BBC4 because I love 20 year old rockumentaries. And the old sky box ran on coal so probably needed an update.

How ‘smart’ is this tv? Well I’ll tell you.

Because when faced with the tv and the Sky box, all under wraps and pristine, I just took out the instruction manuals to see how to proceed. And what they said was: “undo the box, then connect the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah… (continue for 63 pages of ‘blah’)”. I panicked. Don’t know a Scart port from a Big Mac. Not that this tv has anything so ridiculously primitive as ‘scart’. So I called The Brother. He Who Knows. Because he works setting up computer networks and doing technical stuff. Which is why I pay him the big… er… the big cup of tea, really.

And that was when I learned why the new tv was so ‘smart’. Because I read the manual and ran out the house screaming, whereas really, it only needed two cables. Just two. All the old ones from the old Sky box we just threw away, cast aside, ripped out the wall. The tv does the rest all by itself. Connects to the wifi, connects to whatever else it needs to connect to, as if by magic. Oh, and a smug brother, that helps too. One who makes it all look so simple that any normal person might feel stupid, pathetic and ludicrously inadequate for not just pushing in two plugs and saying ‘abracadabra!’

Now that’s smart. The ‘features’ of the advertised smartness are almost irrelevant. For some of us ‘plug’n’play’ is the only way things are ever going to work. That and Big Brother.

Happy viewing.

A xxxx