A sure sign you're a sad, bourgeois consumerist

The first TV was a tiny TV. Dad bought it at a trash ‘n’ treasure market for twenty bucks and it was a second-hand black and white portable with an old rusty coathanger for an antenna and a weird naphthalene smell coming out the back when you turned it on.

Dad didn’t like us watching television so he kept the TV locked in a cupboard and only brought it out for “worthy programmes”: nature docos, ABC news shows, and the occasional old flickery black and white movie, which was pretty much every movie we watched on our old flickery black-and-white TV.

TV No. 2 was slightly bigger: Dad bought it from the Trading Post for eighty bucks and it was a second-hand colour TV with a brand-new state-of-the-art coathanger for an antenna. It was too big for dad to lock in the cupboard so it sat in the corner of the living room, and sometimes when he was at work, I’d sneak over and switch it on. But he’d always find out when he got home, feeling the TV for any warmth, going, “Hmmm… judging by the temperature… I deduce it was… Danny… watching Happy Days …at 4.42 pm! You’re in trouble, mister! No Jacques Cousteau for a month!”

TV No. 3 was the biggest yet: a proper fancy hi-tech TV that didn’t need a coathanger for an antenna. It belonged to my uni mate Matthew and we watched it most nights in our student share household, eating cold pizza, drinking hot beer, and sitting on our lounge suite (a Styrofoam esky that had been ingeniously transformed into a sofa with the addition of three more Styrofoam eskies).

TVs 4, 5 and 6 got bigger still. A gargantuan Goldstar, a mutha of a Magnavox, a freakish f–k-you flatscreen that was about the size of those mobile billboards that get towed around by scooters.

And as the TVs got bigger, everything got bigger. Remote controls became huge hefty handsets that I had to lift with both hands, and rest on the couch so they didn’t crack the glass coffee table. Couches turned into mammoth modular units so I could lie back in a state of vegetative docility and binge-watch with my 1,920 x 1,080 high-def-pixel eyes. My gut got bigger, transforming into a flabby, over-stuffed stable-table with a dent in the middle where the bowl of Sweet Chilli Grainwaves sits.

TV No. 7 was the biggest TV ever: a humungous V8 twin-turbo-diesel iActiveWatch LED/LCD/OLED 3D smart TV with snow traction system and stability control. I saw it in a department store and I wanted it bad – it was so stunningly thin, it rustled every time anyone walked past, like linen drying in a summer breeze. But my beloved wouldn’t let me buy it, she said, “Enough! No more TVs. We can’t afford it. We don’t need it. We’re not going to become a pair of those sad, bourgeois consumerists who sit in front of giant TVs, living brain-dead virtual lives!” I think that’s what she said, I wasn’t really listening, Madagascar 3 was playing on the giant TV and I got distracted by the pretty, pretty colours.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a TV series on ABC3.