Thursday, February 7, 2013

Grundig.

Back when I was wee I watched a lot of telly. At least that was what my mother thought. We had a big old telly with no remote control. You had to go up to it, flip open a panel to the right of the screen and twiddle knobs to do things. Then we got a new telly.
We got a Grundig. Is Grundig still about? A quick google would say 'no'. Oh well.
Shame, they had a lot of style.

Our sitting room at the time was quite small so we went with a little one, probably in or around 14 inches. A man came out and helped install it. It wasn't a technical thing, plugging in a telly, but I think something on the roof had to be hit with a hammer. Twenty minutes later the man was showing my father how to use the new telly. He showed him how to tune in channels and how to use the remote. He gave him the gist of teletext too. I remember seeing the RTE 'Aertel' menu page. I remember seeing the 'KIDS ZONE' advertised, it was page 440. I asked my father to navigate towards this magical zone but by then he was busy trying to tune in Channel 4.
This telly also had a security feature. You could set up a code without which you couldn't watch TV. You'd turn on the telly and just see static until the correct 4 buttons were pressed. And it wasn't just 0-9 either, it was the contrast buttons, the volume, the four coloured quicktext buttons. If you didn't know the code, you weren't watching telly.
My mother, not usually one for technology, figured this out with blinding speed. A day later she had the telly locked down.  I couldn't watch a thing without her approval. My all-encompassing knowledge of Power Rangers went to fuck very quickly. My mother even figured out a timer function so she could turn it on and set it to turn off again an hour later. She had me. She had us all.
I remember trying out different codes. I tried versions of our phone number. I tried the coloured buttons in a row. I tried typing out WORDS on the number keys hoping the telly would respond to me typing out "please turn on". I was desperate. But then I thought of something. I went rooting in the drawer where we kept all the manuals and documentation that came with electrical stuff. That stuff never got thrown away. As a family, we must have been terrified we'd forget how to use the toaster someday. (I always liked the troubleshooting bits at the ends of those manuals. Every single fault that could happen is covered by "Ensure the device is plugged in." and "Ensure the device is powered on.")
I found the TV's manual. I flicked through the features and found the bit about locking the telly. It mentioned a failsafe code in case you forgot the one you specified. It said the failsafe code was on the back page. I smiled. I flicked to the back page. The bottom right hand corner of the back page on the manual was neatly cut away.
I must have been about eight then. That may well have been the first time I sweared.
A few months later I'd settled into things. I had a Gameboy, it wasn't so bad. My friend Niall nearby had a VCR and lots of great films taped.
1993? Maybe I was 10.

Around the same time, though, my aunt Patricia and her husband Declan had just finished building their new house. We went out one evening for some chat and tea. They had bought a *big* telly for their sitting room. It must have been 32 inches.
It was a Grundig.
I sneakily opened the cupboard under the telly and found the manual. It was the same layout, a similar model only scaled up. I flicked straight away to the back page.
There, at the bottom right of the back page was a little rectangle about an inch high and two inches wide.
There were four symbols in the rectangle.
They stood for 'volume up, volume down, channel up, channel down'.

I went home with those four symbols burned into my brain. They're still there, evidently. The regime soon fell. A year later we even got a VCR and I could watch shite films about capoeira in the comfort of my own home.

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