Very early television

A little while ago we retrieved our old portable telly from my Mum's place. We lent it to her back in the days when she thought she wanted something to play video tapes on (it has a built-in VCR), but she could never get used to working it and she only owns one tape in any case. So now if she wants to watch it she takes it next door, and we have our telly back.

She seemed alright with this arrangement, but got her own back eventually. That's a story for another day though. This one centres around the TV.

We put it in our bedroom, intending to set it up for late night movie viewing from behind closed eyelids, but several weeks passed until we connected it up. The catalyst was a particularly good movie together with a cold wet night and an irresistible urge to be horizontal. So I duly plugged in power and aerial, and let it do its auto-tuning thing. The signal isn't great through the portable aerial even on the first floor, but it's OK for the main channels especially when, as I said, viewing mainly takes place with eyes shut.

When it came time to set the sleep timer though, we remembered that the device insists on the date and time being entered before it will accept a sleep time. Quite why this is I haven't worked out, since sleep time settings are measured in "minutes from now" rather than a defined date and time. Still, I entered the correct date and time and we duly fell asleep.

We had to repeat this process the next night. That's another annoying thing about this particular model. If you switch it off completely rather than leaving it on standby, which our green credentials insist we do, the darned thing forgets the time and you have to set it again when next you turn it on.

This palaver continued for several nights until Nikki (ever the pragmatist) pointed out that I didn't actually need to put the correct time in. Genius! My finger was hovering over the "2" button in the dark at the time, so I proceeded to enter a time using just that. This worked fine for 22:22 on the 22nd, but naturally there aren't any months in the 20s, so the machine cleverly wouldn't accept any more 2s. It's not all that clever though. I transferred my finger to the 1 and completed the date with that, leaving the TV believing the time was 22:22 on 22/11/1911.

This being several decades before TV was invented caused us to dissolve in fits of laughter and since then our bedroom telly has always been set to 11:11 11/11/1911. We haven't watched any silent movies yet though ;o)