Olympic Trials.

I’ve been looking forward to the Olympics for quite a while now. Certainly they were higher up on my agenda than the European Cup, though both these events share the distinct advantage of being available to watch on channels everybody can watch. As a rule I find it a step too far to have to pay to watch sport. If it cost, let’s say, a clean, cool fiver to watch an entire test match or four days of good golf then I might mull it over, but I’m really not interested in subscriptions and direct debits for the gamble of there being something on twice a month that might tickle my sporting fancy. I mean, let’s be realistic: if no-one paid their Sky Sports subscriptions that would mean footballer’s salaries and those of their agents would have to come down and then we’d be living in a slightly more realistic world when it comes to the vast gulf between fan and hero. Though if you find yourself hero worshipping Jude Bellingham or Jack Grealish and having to pay for the privilege then maybe you deserve the gulf you get.

You can clearly watch a lot of sport on television without farting around with extra “packages” and contracts and money and more money and how will we feed the kids now you’ve spent all that money just to watch every premiership game this season? But I think it’s fair to say it’s very hard to watch any kind of sport on television without an actual television. Oh, I can hear you now. Why don’t you just stream it live on your laptop or digital device? The answer is simple: because watching a big sport in a big space with lots of little people doing sporty things with or to each other is not as much fun on an iPad or indeed any other device that doesn’t have a screen the size of, er, well, a television. I appreciate that the screen on the laptop I am composing this with is possibly only slightly smaller that the crappy little Matsui television my sister and I used to watch Dynasty on as kids, but that doesn’t mean I’m so in denial as to suggest that I’d rather this than a full screen with all that HD crap thrown in as well. Decorators, pensioners and the recently hospitalised will also sing the praises of listening to sport on the radio, but these are people who would rather listen to The Archers than watch John Wick 2, and are therefore, what’s the word …….. wrong.

So imagine my frustration when, a mere two days after the Olympics started, the television decided to die. Televisions shouldn’t be allowed to die. If they work then they should just work and work and work and jolly well stop trying not to. In fairness, the television had been playing up for a while – scratchy screen and meshes of lines which on a good day would settle down enough to be bearable, digestible, tolerable, watchable; which was enough, on the least bad day. Occasionally it would wobble more and you could just tell it wasn’t enjoying its job – but a television isn’t there to enjoy its job, it just needs to do what it’s been built for and not complain. Anyway, on Sunday evening, following a day out which at one point actually involved walking through the television section of a popular department store, the lines got thicker and the mesh got denser and then that was all there was left. I could still hear what was going on in the eventing (or was it cycling, or sheep-dogging, or oyster diving?) but all I could see was a window into the soul of a television with serious dementia. A television that had had enough. Reached rock bottom. A goner.

When you are forced to endure a power cut or are staying in a hotel that only has the Al Jazeera channel, you quickly realise it is perfectly reasonable to exist without a television, for the time being. There are always other options to while away the silent hours, and some of them don’t even involve alcohol (incidentally, I would imagine if you do find yourself in a country where the hotel can only show Al Jazeera then you might want to keep your alcohol consumption between you and the bottom of the glass). But when a machine that has no real reason to fail (not including being thrown out of a window or dropped in a bath) starts to fail it does spoil the atmosphere somewhat. Naturally, there was no guarantee or warranty left and the price of repair would very likely have cost the price I paid for the television in the first place and on top of that would take longer to repair than it would for me to learn how to build a working television out of dried pasta, a discarded wing mirror, chicken wire and a handful of AAA batteries. And just a couple of days into the Olympics. Maybe if it had happened during the opening ceremony I wouldn’t have minded so much; all that thick rain and irrelevant, desperate inclusivity weighing everything down

Still, when a television finally gives up at least you know it’s time to move on, so I watched some tennis and swimming on my laptop (verdict: it’s not the same and never will be) and had an early night and then in the morning drove to town to find an adequate replacement. The last television was purchased in Tesco’s, who at the time, and for reasons I chose not to pursue, seemed to stock more televisions than Curry’s, but this time they only had one (presumably because all the spare space for “seasonal products” was being used for garden furniture) and so, somewhat inevitably, I went to Curry’s instead (who, to their credit, had quite a few more). A trip to the home media section of Curry’s is like walking onto the set of Minority Report. Here, you can buy a 98 inch television for several pence shy of £9,000 and with a screen that size the footballers will look like they’ve come over to your living room for a slice of orange and a casual racist exchange. There are many unknowns involved when you arrive at the house of someone who owns a 98 inch television worth £9,000, but the one thing you can be sure of is that they will be a dick.

Not that I spent very long being hypnotised by 98 inches of hardware, because I was fishing for a much smaller beast. Some slouched cretin with medieval breath came over to ask me if I needed help, but when I told him my (very) modest budget and he started showing me products of twice the price I knew that he would be less than no help at all; and besides, the commission from my sale wouldn’t even bring him enough to buy a tube of Polos. Once I had found a set that fit my bill I was then told that the sale price advertised in fact expired at the end of March, so I turned the tables and advised that the sign might be a little out of date and that someone, somewhere in this warehouse might think about sharpening up their housework a little, the lazy fucker. I had neither the will nor the energy to drag things out further and so grabbed a box containing a modest television with a modest price and carted it to checkout to be submerged by the usual barrage of offers and contracts and direct debits; the sort that anyone who subscribes to Sky Sports + using their kid’s nappy allowance will be only too familiar with. And then I went home and did the usual blood pressure game involving plugs and wires and routers and cables and as soon as I finished this I went back to watching China v Guyana in the semi-finals of the welterweight pig tickling or the second round of the balloon knot tying time trials, or whatever it was that Claire Balding could be found salivating over next. And I’ve learnt something from all this, which is that I suppose, in reality, and taking Claire Balding firmly into account, that I could actually live without the Olympics, but that I might not last very long without a television. And that is every bit as sad as it sounds.

G B Burton. 30.07.2024