From Baird (or Farnsworth) to Bluetooth: How the Telly Left Us Behind

We inherited a telly the other day. Excellent, 4K, big screen, all that sort of stuff. Suddenly I realised we were still children of the 20th century. It was like the last time I bought a laptop and the one-terabyte disc had gone.

Obviously, being in Spain, we watch Spanish telly. Except, no, we don't—mainly because most of what's on offer is truly terrible. I think they called it 'Zoo Radio' for a while: that format where an individual DJ playing individual tunes gave way to a group of people talking about how their mum pickled eggs, with the occasional song thrown in. Spaniards aren't big followers of the ping-pong conversational style of us Brits at the best of times; they prefer overlapping conversations, but with a group it just turns into a verbal brawl. And that's the very fuel of Spanish telly. So I don't watch a lot. I try the occasional series, or maybe a programme here or there that looks OK, but basically I watch the news in Spanish and that's it. Oh, and the Spanish version of Wheel of Fortune.

Maggie watches much more British TV than I do. She has programmes she can't live without—Bake Off, Have I Got News for You and The Traitors at the moment, though sometimes it's Line of Duty or Silent Witness. Then there are plenty of others she doesn't actively seek out, but if they happen to be on—the British news on ITV or BBC, Pointless, Escape to the Country—she'll watch them.

Netflix, Prime and Filmin (a Spanish platform with a good selection of quality stuff, whether American, British or Moldovan) are what we watch together. Again, Maggie watches much more than I do. And films, of course, both on broadcast and platform-based TV. Sometimes in Spanish but, if it's Hollywood product with people speaking mainly English, then we'll watch it in English so that Daniel Kaluuya sounds like Daniel Kaluuya and Dakota Johnson sounds like Dakota Johnson.

Perhaps we're a bit old-fashioned, too, in thinking of television as something you watch together, sitting in front of a big screen, rather than something to be consumed individually on a mobile, tablet or computer. For us, the telly is still a shared experience, even if Maggie does rather more of the watching than I do.

Anyway, we got this telly and suddenly realised just how Cretacean we'd become. Our set picks up British TV through a completely illegal—well, un-legal rather than illegal—satellite dish fed through a Freesat decoder and pumped into the telly via an HDMI lead. I'd presumed modern tellies came with decoders built in. How wrong I was. Apparently, some modern tellies have done away with the traditional connections for aerials and satellite dishes, although others still have them. Increasingly, the assumption seems to be that you'll get your television through the internet. Now, that might be fine if you're in the UK watching UK television or in Spain watching Spanish television, but it doesn't work so well for us immigrants pining for Albert Square or dancers on an Elstree sound stage.

'Never mind,' I thought. 'Enter the 21st century: find an internet solution, buy a VPN, get the software to pretend we're in the UK, and use iPlayer and ITVX to watch British telly.' But Channel 4 and the BBC are well onto that scam. They twigged we were using a VPN in about half a millisecond. I'm told there are ways around it, but I reckon you need a degree in computer science just to go on watching TV.

And do you know that, because there's so much TV on demand now, nobody thinks you need to record any more? So not only could we not decode the British signal, we couldn't record it either. There are gadgets and add-ons that will sort that out, apparently, but for Pete's sake. So, the Freesat box remains in use.

Then there's the fact that we're a bit hard of hearing. Especially when our wintertime pellet burner is roaring away, it's nice to use headphones. In fact, when the Spanish is pumped directly into my ears, I can understand most of it most of the time. But modern TVs don't always come with standard 3.5mm headphone jacks any more. They have Bluetooth, of course, which is straightforward enough for one set of headphones, but many won't broadcast to two separate headsets—and Maggie hears no better over the roar of the stove than I do. Apparently, you can buy Bluetooth splitters or use optical audio feeds to get round that, but we're right back to a world in which watching the telly requires more technical knowledge than seems reasonable.

And then I started thinking about the programmes themselves, and the differences in style, not just content, between British television and Spanish telly. I was going to cover that here, but I've just realised how long this piece is already, so you'll have to wait for the next thrilling instalment: why the Spanish version of MasterChef involves public humiliation and lasts three hours; why The Traitors and Strictly failed miserably in Spain; why Big Brother turned into an endless shouting match where everyone speaks at once; and how the Spanish version of Countdown manages to plod on happily.