The Big Screen

The TV blew up just before we left for the holiday. Everything went in to sepia- it had to go- it was second hand when we acquired it ten years ago. Of course this made an ample talking point with family, between ourselves on walks, when stuck in strange bars, and gliding through Tescos. Techy stuff seems to interest everybody.
I remember in particular The Angel in Bourne, which drags customers in on the premise of it being 'More than a Hotel...' and where if you venture so boldly, you find yourselves sat in a purple blancmange. Julie and I stared at each other in disbelief. The next place we tried even the dog was dying.
But one thing Bourne is blessed with is BIG FLAT SCREEN TV's, through every window you see them, beaming Viva Forever! (or suchlike). It is tempting to see a reciprocal correlation between size of TV and decline in content, that HD might inversely relate to interest, that LCD stands for lowest common denominator, and this particularly nasty piece was just about the worst thing we had to sit through this year, a documentary that proved the Spice Girls were just about the most self serving creatures of all time, and had unfortunately remained so. However they were big. It proved the monumentalisation of twelve year old egos is just fine with everyone.
But these big screens!? What to do? Certainly without a room filling flat screen you might feel a little unambitious. In Bourne you'd be letting down the street.  A cursory glance at the paper gave little information, only glittering 40" prizes in the SALES. I couldn't work out any of them actually did, apart from take over your sitting room with every celebrities pimple.
But as soon as we got home sanity came too. It was clearly a case of return, while you still can, to CRT, then pick the finest manufacturer (little debate there...surely Bang and Olufsen) and go on E-bay. Within seconds we knew, we might get one of the 'prettiest TV's ever made' (see above) for £100, OK a bit more in the end, then it was just a schlep down to South Kensington where it had apparently sat in a spare bedroom, to retrieve it. Now here it is, quite a sparkling thing, a design classic, and we're watching Zulu just like everybody else. Of course the screen being what it is, we'll miss half of Auction Hunters, literally, but that's a small price to pay.