Regular visitors to The World of Me will remember the trepidation I felt the day I had basic satellite TV installed. If you can recall, I was worried that after six months of living a life without a fully functioning television service, the presence of satellite television in my home would soon transform me back into my old ways of being a bulbous couch potato.

Luckily this never happened.

Despite the promise of many hours of Freesat entertainment, over the passing months the television sat ignored in the corner of the lounge, its presence only being felt when episodes of Heroes and the weekly rants of Charlie Brooker required their compulsory viewings. So having not watched television for over eighteen months, it’s odd that I’ve just had Sky+ installed.

It all started last month when a special offer became available to all employees of British Gas. For a mere £49 installation charge, British Gas employees could have the Sky+ satellite television service installed and enjoy all the benefits of hard-drive recordable digital television. If that wasn’t all, for a mere £20 per-month subscription British Gas employees could receive all of Sky’s digital content, including the extra movie and sports channels.

It was an offer too good to miss, so I phoned the Sky call-centre to arrange an appointment for the installation. It was then that I started to get a bit excited. Once the installation was complete I’d have the Discovery Channel – I could watch Mythbusters again! I’d be able to watch Battlestar Galactica without having to download it from the internet, I could watch the Pobol y Cwm Omnibws on S4C anytime I wanted for absolutely no reason at all!

The engineer came to install the equipment on Friday 5th October. Another engineer came on Monday 7th October to put right all the things that the Friday engineer had failed to install (the required phone line and a new LNB, the bit that makes the satellite dish work). With the installation complete and my house empty of satellite installers, I sat down with my new remote control unit and worked my way through the pages of the Sky TV guide, scouting for any of the thousands of TV programmes I’d been so looking forward to watching.

And do you know what, there was absolutely f*ck all on!

Subscribing to Sky+ has not changed my viewing habits at all. All that has changed is that I now have hundreds of channels to ignore and I no longer have to remember to watch Heroes and Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe as the Sky+ digibox will record them for me. I guess I’ll just have to wait until next year when the new episodes of my favourite US Sci-Fi series are broadcast. In the meantime, Sky TV? Why TV more like!

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