A cunning TV plan to end my ÔzapperÕ domination?

Date Published: {J}

I have become suspicious lately that there may be a conspiracy between many of the television channels to time their ad-breaks to roughly coincide so that it is impossible for me to get away by simply pressing the ‘zap’ button on the remote.

Now in what might be termed semi-retirement, I try to delay my collapse into the armchair at least until the late afternoons, but one of the most important pieces of equipment for all incipient couch potatoes of the late afternoon has to be the remote control.

There are days when I have to enthuse about Peppa Pig and Puffin’ Pete when telly watching becomes a special event in the company of grandchildren. These are special events not to be missed.

But, when I am in my pomp, I have a cuppa to one side, a newspaper to the other, the remote control left on my knee, and am monarch of all I survey.

At the merest touch of a button I can summon Judge Judy before me. Now, she is ‘in my playpen’, as she likes to put it herself . . . and during the hours of 4.30pm to about 7pm, it is possible to tune-in and tune-out on TV3 and ITV2 to what she is doing in her courtroom.

I find that bursts of her no-nonsense rulings are enough for me. Too much of a good thing, don’t you know . . . like the time we holidayed on Cyprus and the hotel owner and his wife spent the entire afternoon watching a local channel which put out endless episodes of Mork and Mindy.

During that time, it was impossible to get them to come to the reception desk and they merely shouted out to ‘collect key yourself’. Asked about the possible security implications of this arrangement, they said that ‘here, all everyone is family’, and went back to rolling about on the couch at the antics of alien Mork (Robin Williams).

The essence of my afternoon choice – to tune-in and tune-out – is provided by that marvellous invention ‘the zapper button’. So, when TV3 or ITV2 decide to go into interminable ad-breaks, at the merest touch of a button I can be anywhere else in the television world in which I please.

While they’re flogging washing powder, daytime bingo, or indeed some of their dreadful programmes to come, I know that with one ‘zap’ I can be with National Geographic, Air Crash Investigation, World War II in HD, or catching a few minutes again of any one of the old films I saw in the local cinema all those years ago and of which I remember most of the dialogue.

Not too long ago, for instance on Turner Classic Movies, I saw the climax to An Affair To Remember (Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr) and Brief Encounter (Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson), two of the great ‘weepies’ of all time. Why, the family wondered, how I had become so upset . . . me being a pushover for the odd weepie. They threatened to take the ‘zapper’ away if I didn’t dry my tears and promise to behave myself!

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.