You will love this tale ! From Jos Biggs. ! Probably happened to you ?

Usually I am blameless. Usually it is a dastardly plot by Technology, concocted in some dark recesses of its malignant soul, and executed with the one aim of creeping up behind me and causing me maximum grief for no other reason than that it can!

But this time it was different - it was my fault, I brought it upon myself. I was tired of missing the first episode of something only to have everybody ask me why I didn’t watch it on Catch-up.

Right! I thought, I don’t know how, but I’ll get this Catch-up or perish in the attempt.

Nobody was on hand to tell me what to do; the best information I could glean from anybody was ‘You press Catch-up.’

Armed with this rather vague instruction I picked up one of the remotes - there are two, one for the soundbar and one for the telly’s Humax box.

Step 1: I put my glasses on.

Step 2: I read the little words next to the various buttons on the remote - none of them said Catch-up.

Step 3: I employed logic. I figured that it would be somewhere in the telly’s workings, so, like Alice going down the rabbit hole, I pressed every button in turn.

I found all sorts of things, all of them incomprehensible to me, but none of them produced Catch-up.

In fact they didn’t produce anything understandable, but by now I was so far down the rabbit hole that I couldn’t get back out again.

Trapped in this seventh circle of technological Hell I switched remotes. I didn’t think the sound bar remote had anything to do with anything except the sound bar, but it did have a lot of buttons.

So I pressed them. All of them. One at a time.

By now I was stuck - I couldn’t back out and get the normal programmes, not even the Guide, and neither could I now get any sound.

Ha! I checked the batteries - full of life.

I know, I thought, I’ll turn it off and then turn it on again, I’d heard that works with computers, and a telly is of the same family.

Except I couldn’t. No matter what I did I was stuck with a silent picture behind an opaque screen. 

By now I’d had enough, so I went to bed, leaving the telly to do its own thing, a sort of silent movie behind a lace curtain kind of effect.

In the morning it had turned itself off. Fine, except now I couldn’t turn it on, not even to silent movie behind lace curtain effect.

But then along came Stephen. For several hours he battled resolutely with it, and eventually it gave up and consented to revert to normality.

However, I have learnt in the process that my telly can’t get Catch-up - it’s too old! And I’ve learnt it the hard way!