Three and a half years ago Mum let us have her old Freeview receiver. We brought it home and I was very excited to get, for free, loads more channels than the five terrestrial ones. Well, we fiddled and fussed with the darn thing but couldn't get it to work. I checked out the Freeview website and found that, despite being only 30 miles from London, our postcode was unable to receive Freeview. Had we lived in the Shetland Islands or a far-flung spot in the Highlands we would have been fine. But here, within spitting distance of the capital city, it was no go.
About six months later we had another attempt at getting it to work - still no luck - so it was put back in the bag and we resigned ourselves to putting up with only five channels. It was particularly annoying when the BBC would advertise really interesting programmes on BBC3 or BBC4 and I knew full well I couldn't watch them.
Fast forward to last month when I had to call in a TV aerial repair chap. He fixed our aerial beautifully and I was asking him why we couldn't get Freeview in this area. 'Oh, but you can,' he replied. So I showed him the Freeview box we'd got from my Mum. Apparently it is now virtually antique and would be hard pressed to pick up anything anywhere. It wasn't that old - perhaps 7 or 8 years - but is now obsolete. If my Dad had still been alive he would not have been pleased - having paid £99 for it.
A couple of weeks ago P and I were in Woolworths checking out their mega-sale (I still can't believe Woollies have gone bust - it's going to be very sad without them on the High Street) and saw they were selling set top boxes for £16.00, with the 20% discount that was on pretty much everything that day we ended up paying £13.80.
Well, it was a doddle to set up (we'll gloss over the fact that the video now doesn't record), and I'm like a child in a sweet shop, there's so much choice - although I do admit that much of it is repeats. But who cares when it means you can do your ironing in the afternoon whilst watching re-runs of the original 'Randall and Hopkirk Deceased' on ITV4 - heaven.
Hope this gets posted ;-)
I ended up giving my old freeview box away too - Angelsey had no signal. Now we moved back to civilisation a friend gave us a box for nothing and it's ace.
I love the history channel.
Posted by: sharie | 12/19/2008 at 08:51 PM