I got Cable and there's nothing on......

I bought a maisonette in the Plymouth hills
With a nice garden but rotten cills
Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched 'round and 'round 'til half-past dawn
There was a hundred and fifty-seven channels and nothin' on

Well now home entertainment was my baby's wish
So I hopped into Lidl for a satellite dish
I tied it to the top of my French car
I came home and I pointed it out into the stars
A message came back from the great beyond
There's seven channels in Russian and loads on

So I bought a big hammer it was solid steel cast
And in the blessed name of Elvis well I just let it blast
'Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet
And they busted me for disturbin' the almighty peace
Judge said "What you got in your defense son?"
"Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on"
I can see by your eyes friend you're just about gone
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on...


Sorry Bruce Springsteen for mangling your song but now I’ve entered the digital age I’ve found that life ain’t as rosy as they promised.

The verses above are not in strict chronological order. Initially we had a Freeview box at home. There is an old saw that tells us that you ‘don’t get owt for nowt’. And that’s just what you get with your freeview box, more channels of dross TV. My Ukrainian wife despaired when she first came here and saw the paucity of the quality of the shows we watch. She couldn’t understand why our TV was full of reality shows and documentaries. Where was the entertainment she asked? In Ukraine the TV is still heavily entertainment based. They have shows where people, ‘stars’ get up and sing songs that the audience can sing along too, and to show how important this is, after a performance, the audience stand and applaud and the performer gets presented with a bouquet of flowers. They have a great comedy show where students from Universities across the former soviet union all compete with their own comedy sets. Its very funny and my Russian is crap! They show films regularly.

She cannot understand why we want to watch programmes about people living in filthy houses, or cockroach infested restaurants, people beating each other or Chavs screaming at each other for sleeping with their best friends, mothers or sheep.

So I went to lidl and bought their satellite dish and receiver (it cost about £70) stuck it on the side of the house and pointed it at the Sirius satellite and bingo, wall to wall Russian/Ukrainian TV. My wife is happy. But I don’t get to see a lot of TV, which in many ways is a good thing, cos after all there’s not a lot on.

Even so there are a few things on British TV that my wife likes, such as Strictly Come Dancing and the X factor so we were using the freeview box a bit (and mainly for Cbeebies for my daughter).But we had a problem when the wind blew the picture pixilatted and was annoying.

So now we’ve got cable! We have the superior service free for the first month, loads of channels and yes nothing on….its still crap T.V.

Who watches this stuff and apart from being a bit of Time Team fan (although even that’s got a bit boring) on one of the channels and that programme about American Choppers, which seems to me after watching three or four episodes to be more about these guys yelling at each other than about the bikes and is getting tedious very quickly - there is really nothing on. (Oh I forgot about the music channels, that one with the RnB videos with loadsa sexy foxs undulating around two bob or what ever these rappers call themselves - I watch that a bit!)

To be honest the Russian channels are better despite the fact I can only understand about 0.5% of the dialogue.

Yes so 157 channels and nothing on – progress hey?