Black Christmas

The beauty of V+ is that you can record things months ago and not realise you have them until you check through what you have stored and there it is.

I have the last three episodes of the first series of Heroes on there and I recently had the great pleasure of watching the first series of Ashes to Ashes over the course of a week - much better than waiting for the next episode. I'm currently watching Black Christmas, a 1974 horror film in which a murderous stalker gets into a sorority house and picks off the housemates while phoning them, threatening to eat out their pussies. Oh dear, somebody else has just bought it, courtesy of a big hook on a pulley in the attic....

I love cable TV, I love my V+ box and I'm really going to miss it when we move (we have to go to satellite because we're going to a non-cable area). But anyway, they're all much of a muchness I suppose.

I keep trying to persuade my parents to upgrade to V+, but they don't want the hassle of easy to use programming, series recording, pausing and rewinding live telly. Instead, they wanted to stick to their old cable box that took ten seconds to respond to a key press. That was until Virgin phoned them to tell them they were going to post them a new box and, if they were OK fitting it, it'd save having to book the job - there'd be telephone support, etc.

I went to install it this afternoon, a simple task that involved:

1. Pulling the telly out from the corner of the room
2. Fighting with 500m of various entangled cables in order to unplug the old box
3. Getting covered in dust and fluff from the dark recesses of the corner of doom
4. Trying to persuade Little Con (awww, she's walking now, you know) to go to her mum instead of trying to kiss the men on the telly
5. Plugging the new box in
6. Waiting for something to happen

All this time, I had Big Con telling me that I needed to take the serial number from the old box.

Stress levels rising, I blew the dust from my nose and washed it from my hands and told Big Con that the next stage was to phone Virgin to activate the new box.

"But there's nothing on the telly", she questioned me

"That's because you need to activate the new box, phone them up."

She did, and got through to a Scottish assistant. Even getting past the security questions was a trauma.

"I need to speak to the account holder [my dad], can you put them on so they can give their authorisation for you?"

My dad can't understand English, let alone Scottish accents, I knew we were in for trouble, but I think the woman realised she'd be better dealing with Connie.

We waited for the telly to start doing something: blank screen. Waited some more: blank screen. Waited, waited, waited.

After half an hour, I told Mum to phone them back. It was the same woman she'd spoken to previously.

"Can you verify the account number, your name, password, address and postcode? Can you put the account holder on to authorise you to do this?"

Fuck.

"I'll send a stronger signal through, don't touch anything"

What she meant by this was "I was too off my tits on smack to be bothered to press the button when you phoned earlier, I'll do it now, for fuck's sake, but I'll phone back in ten minutes to check it's OK".

The telly came back on straight away, but not the film channels. When she phoned back, Mum (getting VERY stressed now), told her about the film channels not coming up.

"Oh, the new box has a different PIN"

"BUT THE INPUT FOR THE PIN ISN'T THERE!!!!!"

"I'll transfer you"

Another Scottish man "You're PIN's changed because it's a new box"

"I KNOW, BUT THERE'S NOWHERE TO ENTER THE PIN!!!!"

(My brother was also here at this point, helpfully saying that you should be able to take off the requirement for a PIN in the settings.

"No you can't, IT'S SET BY THE NETWORK!"

"At least they're in Britain, I can't stand it when they put you through to India, you can't understand them"

"I can understand them better from India than from Scotland"

"I'm going to change my password to 'all muslims are evil'"

"That's nice, what about all the Christians being evil too? Besides, if you're put through to Bombay, they're likely to agree with you about muslims because they're probably Hindus", fucking tool)

"Hang on, I'll transfer you"

The line went dead, then the automated options started, mum started talking to them, and then got through to somebody in India.

"Can I have you account number please madam?"

Fuck.

FUCK!

Anyway, the Scottish man must have done something and everything turned out nice again. Until Mum noticed that the films were cut off top and bottom because theirs isn't a widescreen telly.

"The other box didn't do that, I'm going to go back to the other one, I can't COPE with that black screen at the top and bottom of the picture."

No, but you can cope with a shite old telly box that takes four fucking hours to change the bastard channel, can you? CAN YOU???

And I left my cocking housekeys there. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.