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Entry tags:
Digital TV
I accidentally triggered the 'Auto Retune' feature on my no-longer-new digital TV set (bought as a result of the forced digital TV changeover) as a result of trying to change channels and inputs without using the remote controller, which has never worked properly since the day it was bought. (The one initially supplied by the shop didn't work at all, so they took it back and gave us one that sort of functioned quite a lot of the time when it was new, then got steadily worse and worse. I did try buying a replacement online, but it wasn't fully compatible with the TV and was just as unreliable, so I concluded that the issue was with the infrared reception on the TV set rather than with the actual remote control handset...)
As a result I normally control the television as far as possible entirely via the buttons on the side, which *do* work 100% reliably when pressed, as opposed to only after multiple frantic repeats and much waving around. I managed to abort the retuning process only about 2% of the way through, but discovered within moments that this had wiped all the existing channel settings and the TV could no longer receive anything at all. So I had to relocate the "Auto Tune" feature and retune the whole lot from the beginning. This took about eight minutes, and at the end of it the TV had auto-detected precisely five channels, one of which was "Legacy TV" and one "the Jewellery Channel". None of them were the BBC.
I tried again after moving the set-top aerial to a place on the floor with better reception, and got an assortment of channels starting at about Channel 63, again not including any of the basic ones I actually wanted to watch. A desperate third effort (the definition of madness, repeatedly trying the same thing in the hopes of achieving a different result) finally restored what appeared to be the full spectrum of TV coverage, just ten minutes before the end of the programme I had originally been intending to watch on BBC2. I think it's all back now, at least the useful bits, though digital TV reception without a roof aerial has never been great around here. Luckily it wasn't a programme I was particularly invested in, but just a comedy that sounded potentially mildly interesting.
I did enjoy the third series of the Bristol-set "The Outlaws" -- possibly not quite as good as the initial one, as the plotline is getting a bit strained, but it manages to score with me, as ever, by including moments of genuine warmth and feeling for its characters as well as poking fun at them or putting them into humiliating situations for a laugh. The basic concept remains the same, as a group of wildly different characters (aging black feminist class warrior, aristocratic celebrity vlogger, top-scoring half-Indian half-Polish A-level student, gangling gormless solicitor, etc.) are forced by circumstances to work together to evade both the law and the underworld, while supposedly carrying out community service. But by this point, like Blake's 7 they are a pretty tight-knit team who trust each other in the main despite their differences, so most of the inter-personal challenge comes from the outside -- and most of that, unusually, has happy endings. (It's probably one of the few cases where I have, as so often before, found myself shouting mentally for the story *not* to ship two leading characters together but to allow the external romantic relationship to win out over the desire to pair off the principals... and then the writers actually did allow the character to keep his separate love-interest, to my considerable delight!)
As a result I normally control the television as far as possible entirely via the buttons on the side, which *do* work 100% reliably when pressed, as opposed to only after multiple frantic repeats and much waving around. I managed to abort the retuning process only about 2% of the way through, but discovered within moments that this had wiped all the existing channel settings and the TV could no longer receive anything at all. So I had to relocate the "Auto Tune" feature and retune the whole lot from the beginning. This took about eight minutes, and at the end of it the TV had auto-detected precisely five channels, one of which was "Legacy TV" and one "the Jewellery Channel". None of them were the BBC.
I tried again after moving the set-top aerial to a place on the floor with better reception, and got an assortment of channels starting at about Channel 63, again not including any of the basic ones I actually wanted to watch. A desperate third effort (the definition of madness, repeatedly trying the same thing in the hopes of achieving a different result) finally restored what appeared to be the full spectrum of TV coverage, just ten minutes before the end of the programme I had originally been intending to watch on BBC2. I think it's all back now, at least the useful bits, though digital TV reception without a roof aerial has never been great around here. Luckily it wasn't a programme I was particularly invested in, but just a comedy that sounded potentially mildly interesting.
I did enjoy the third series of the Bristol-set "The Outlaws" -- possibly not quite as good as the initial one, as the plotline is getting a bit strained, but it manages to score with me, as ever, by including moments of genuine warmth and feeling for its characters as well as poking fun at them or putting them into humiliating situations for a laugh. The basic concept remains the same, as a group of wildly different characters (aging black feminist class warrior, aristocratic celebrity vlogger, top-scoring half-Indian half-Polish A-level student, gangling gormless solicitor, etc.) are forced by circumstances to work together to evade both the law and the underworld, while supposedly carrying out community service. But by this point, like Blake's 7 they are a pretty tight-knit team who trust each other in the main despite their differences, so most of the inter-personal challenge comes from the outside -- and most of that, unusually, has happy endings. (It's probably one of the few cases where I have, as so often before, found myself shouting mentally for the story *not* to ship two leading characters together but to allow the external romantic relationship to win out over the desire to pair off the principals... and then the writers actually did allow the character to keep his separate love-interest, to my considerable delight!)