Dim the lights – and your brain – for my smart new TV

Kill your television (thanks, Ned)

Photo © 2025 Yannick Van Houtven | https://unsplash.com/fr/@yannickvanhoutven

“The TV has stopped working.”

This is the kind of announcement that I both dread and am accustomed to in the Dabbs household. A bit like the bath-fitter who is expected to know how to fix blocked sewers, as a computer journalist I am held personally to account upon the failure at home of anything electronic... or indeed electric, gas-fired or petrol-engined.

In fact, it seems that it merely needs to have hinges for it to come under my all-encompassing ‘tech’ remit.

Years ago I had a neighbour who required frequent interventions to get her PC up and running again. It seemed the neighbourly thing to do, given that she was long retired and found it a struggle to keep in touch with her grown-up children by email, while I earn a living from conning readers into thinking I know what a computer is. By the time I discovered what the problem was on my first visit – she was the last person in the world still to be using AOL installed from a cover-mounted floppy disk – it was too late to back out.

No indeed, for evermore after this initial visit, I was asked to make return visits to sort out her word processor, her web browser, and then back to the ad-shit-riddled AOL program again and again.

Then one day, she phoned me for help because her TV was not working.

I told her that I do not fix television sets. She took this really quite badly and sulked for months and ignored me if we happened to pass in the local supermarket. This was great as it meant I no longer had to fix her computer either.

Dealing with tech crises in one’s own home is another matter, of course. No doubt you are obliged to deal with something similar from partners, family members and/or flatmates from time to time. There are days when you arrive at work, drenched in rain, whereupon the phone begins to ring incessantly, your project is on a dive, the boss is on a stomp, your office enemy has stolen your wastepaper basket and a mischievous colleague has swapped your office chair for a milking stool.

Then your spouse/mum/mate/teenage daughter sends a text message from home to say: “The internet’s not working.”