Robert Hampton

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24th December 2011

Selection Box
Posted by at 7.04pm | Television | No responses

You can tell Christmas is here, because the Liverpool branch of Wilkinson had Creme Eggs and chocolate bunnies out on the shelves today. Until now I’d always thought that this sort of thing only happened in the minds of lazy stand-up comedians, but no. Still, I suppose it’s handy for anyone who wants to celebrate Jesus’s birth and death at the same time.

As ever, the TV companies wheel out the big guns at Christmas. I’ve been through the Radio Times, although the traditional circling of programmes with a red biro has been replaced this year by the setting of the digital TV recorder. Here’s what my TVonics box will be recording over the next few days.

Tonight

Lapland (BBC One, 10pm): An obnoxious Birkenhead family go on a trip to Lapland and along the way learn the true meaning of Christmas. It doesn’t sound incredibly promosing, but the wonderful Sue Johnston is in it, so it won’t be a total waste of time.

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2nd March 2008

KTHX SKAI

I felt quite smug when our Sky box conked out a couple of months back. I was able to easily swap it with my sister’s old digibox (no longer used by her since she switched to Virgin Media) and get our TV back. Unfortunately my smugness, as so often happens, was misplaced, and this box has now also failed. The usual tricks (power off, then on; switch on while holding down “back up” to force a software download) didn’t work. Cue call to Sky’s expensive 0870 technical helpdesk.

I hate phoning technical support for anything. I’m a fairly smart, intelligent guy (stop laughing, you) but for some reason I always turn into a gibbering idiot when speaking on the phone to someone in a call centre, and find myself mumbling “OK… OK… I’ll try that” like a simpleton to every suggestion offered by the operator from their script.

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