We have a fairly crappy service from Sky TV here – our picture has always broken up badly when the weather is bad and over time, it’s got worse and worse. These days, the +1 channels are completely unwatchable and the rest is very hit and miss. We think it’s to do with the size of our dish but we are unable to do anything about it because of lack of funds.

Last night, we were a bit depressed as DM is now standing shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the jobless queue so we went to the pub to console ourselves. While there, we got chatting to several people – firstly the sadistic RAF trainers who, we discovered, were responsible for the hour of endless helicopter flights over our house so low that if I said we’d got rubber tyre marks on the roof, I’d not be far from the truth. It turned out the helicopters were full of soldiers on training exercises where they were dumped out of the helicopter and had to go “on the run” for two days without being caught. We also spoke to two lovely blokes who were working on the TV mast – at the time, the only thing we thought was that they were the ones responsible for the noise that’s been like a giant bee buzzing for the last couple of weeks.

This morning, however, DM thought about the mast. It beams terrestrial TV out to places quite a long distance away and it copes with signals going up and down hill. The problem is we’ve got no aerial. So, he mulled and pondered and decided to stick a cable in the TV then connect it to the fire irons via a crocodile clip (see above). Madness, you may well think. Well, I did anyway.

However, this Heath Robinson set up actually works. We’ve now got 118 channels of what is, let’s face it, mostly complete trash but at least it’s unbroken trash. Somehow it all looks a lot brighter and more colourful too. So we now will only need to put up with the poor quality service from Sky for the subscription channels. The best bit is it’s completely free. All we had to do was dig out an old cable and away we went. What are we watching on our super-dooper new service? Yep – year-old reruns of "Have I Got News For You" on Dave!!! We sure do know how to live it up on our fourth wedding anniversary.