What’s It Called In Your House?

Nowadays, the prospect of hoiking one’s arse off the sofa and shuffling across the room to press a button on the telly seems unthinkable, though unbelievably, there was a day when this was the only way of changing the channel. This all changed when remote controls were first introduced in the early ‘80s and there ensued a wide variety of nicknames for them. “Remote” now seems to be pretty much the norm, though there are still a few hangovers from the old days.

Among examples I still hear today are “The Blip”, “The Zapper” (and rarely “The Frank” [Zapper]). My lovely wife’s name of choice is the beautifully explanatory “The Presser”, while it was always known in our house when I was growing up, as simply “The Sound Thing”. As I recall our original Sound Thing had six buttons (volume up/down, channel up/down, mute and standby), ran off a car battery and had to be held an inch from the telly, thereby negating the need for a “Sound Thing” at all.

These days, our front room is overrun with remote controls with buttons of every shape and description for devices that form part of the modern entertainment system. The capabilities of even the most simplistic of machines is now vast and hence the buttons have shrunk accordingly. Sadly, evolution has yet to catch up and human fingers have remained the same size; the result is that often buttons are pressed in error, but this is a minor gripe.

With the plethora of buttons at your fingertips, you either need the dexterity of Liberace or small child-like digits, which might go some way to explaining why our four-year old is so adept at pressing 7 and 4 to watch children’s channel CITV (to clarify, he’s a small child, not a flamboyant pianist). Jeremy Beadle, God rest his soul, was also probably quite tasty with a Sound Thing. On the other hand, maybe he was crap. Ho ho…