I don’t suppose there’s a remote chance of hotels taking any notice of this rant, but I’ll push a few buttons anyway and see if they tune in to my irritated telly vision. In the last four months I’ve stayed in hotels at variously, Heathrow Airport, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Dien Bien Phu, Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City, Paris and Nabq Bay, Egypt. In each one the TV and remote control worked in different ways and trying to master them was a fast track to insanity.
Forget the English language as a guide. In half of them ON did not mean ‘on’ in the sense of you pressing the ON switch and the TV coming on. ON in fact meant nothing at all. Because for the ON switch to work, first of all the TV had to be switched on. What’s that you say? The ON switch is supposed to switch the TV on? No…not in seven of the hotels. There the vital ON switch was on the TV itself, hidden away in a sheer black plastic bit in the gloom. Only when that ON switch – which was not marked ON – or in fact anything, was switched on could you use the ON switch on the remote to….switch the TV on.
With me? No? I sympathise, that’s how I felt some nights in Vietnam in the early hours struggling to find light entertainment while trying to digest the appalling Vietnamese cuisine. (The Chinese have the best food in the world, cross the border and it’s the ubiquitous Pho noodle soup-with- everything. It’s pronounced furr by the way, which was pretty much the sound my stomach was making later.)
Back to the remotes. In the otherwise superb Saigon-Morin hotel in Hue pressing the lower button meant you went up through the channels. The higher switch, down through the channels. In Paris the apparent volume control moved the channels, and the channel surfer moved the volume. Still with me?
The apparently obvious buttons were one thing, but the mystery ones with no readily observable function were even more baffling. I stabbed one with a forefinger one night in Ho Chi Minh City in sheer frustration at not being able to get CNN. I retired to bed baffled and eventually came groggily awake in the middle of a dark night. (And when your room does not actually have a real window, but rather a cute but useless faux fenetre complete with redundant handles to not open it, dark is really dark.) A light played on my face and a man was speaking to me in a foreign language. It was clear someone had broken into my room and was about to rob and kill me.
I jumped up and tried to scream but managed only a hoarse gargling sound, to discover the TV on and Magnum PI grilling someone in dubbed Vietnamese. The mystery button was obviously a timer which had switched the TV on automatically at 3am.
Then there’s the thorny problem of the button for the, ahem, adult film channels. In Hong Kong you had to de-activate the film channel before you could access English TV and get the whole dreary 90 minutes of West Ham v Fulham, as I recall it. I don’t want to get prissy here, each to his own taste, but I don’t like porn. It’s bad enough being on your own in a foreign city without writhing naked bodies tormenting you. A panel appeared: “Would you would like to activate the Adult channel?” There was an arrow to move over Yes or No. I pressed No and the panel disappeared then popped up again, “Would like to activate the Adult channel?” Over and over. It was like a circle of hell with no exit. I called maintenance. After 30 minutes with a screwdriver they de-activated it and I got the West Ham/Fulham game.
In Da Nang the remote wouldn’t work at all. I tried every angle; on floor pointing upwards, standing on bed pointing downwards; even remote held sideways, upside down. Nothing.They sent an obliging chap to my room who walked up to the set, placed the remote an inch from the control panel and pressed. On came the TV. I dubbed it the non-remote, remote.
I easily solved the problem in Egypt where the usually humble remote resembled an iPhone. I took one look and handed it to my ten year old daughter who mastered it in seconds. Then I’d prod her, and she’d change the channel. Simple.
