London’s telly-watchers will all explode today

Well, today’s the day when Londoners bleat and moan and slash their wrists.  For today’s the day that analogue TV gets switched off forever.

Here in the North-West, we slipped almost silently into the digital age some four years ago.  Analogue TV ceased here in 2008 with scarcely a mummer from the population of the North-West.  Indeed, it seemed to be hard to find anybody who’d even noticed since most people had been ‘digital’ for a very long time.

In fact, the gripe from this area was the number of times re-scans were needed in order to correctly find all the digital channels as they shifted about between different transmitters operating on different frequencies. I think it was three of four different occasions on which re-scans were needed, not the two originally advertised.  Then, after the final one, everything was fine, and people just got on with life.

Of course, the reality is that for nearly everybody in the North-West, viewing is via a ‘Sky’ receiver or Virgin cable. There are not that many actually relying on Freeview’s ‘terrestrial’ transmitters, and certainly none that were watching analogue signals.

Compare and contrast the outcry from Londoners.  Like a Chuckle Brothers sketch there seemed to be loads of folk running back and forth like headless chickens when analogue BBC2 disappeared to be replaced by analogue ITV1 three weeks ago.  Eh? How do they even know?  WTF are these people doing still tuned to analogue?

Today they will no longer have any analogue channels to tune in to at all, bless ’em.  And today, probably later this evening whilst the dramatic light-show fills London’s cloudy skies from the Crystal Palace transmitter tower, everybody using Freeview will need to do another re-scan in order to pick up the rest of the digital channels from their new more powerful transmitters.

How hard can that be?

Yep, very hard for stooopid Southerners it seems.

Heck, the stereotype of northerners is that they are stupid and extremely resistant to change.  Indeed, that’s what I thought when I lived in London.  But, as an ex-pat watching the wailing and sobbing from afar, I realised very quickly that it’s actually Londoners that are stupid and resistant to change.  Why all the fuss guys?

Scouting around online discussions and via various fora, I see people going out of their way to re-organise their aerials to pick-up analogue signals from areas outside of London.  Yep, to pick up signals that will also be switched off in 3 months from now.  Why are they doing this?  What is wrong with these people?

It’s not as if Freeview boxes are expensive or anything.

Hey, Londoners, get over yourselves.  We switched off analogue TV four years ago.  We’ve moved on.  It’s time for you to join us in the modern world.