Fourteen years ago, Tim Dowling received a text from his eldest son claiming he'd just found the TV face down on the sitting room floor, destroyed. He didn't entirely buy his son's theory about the dogs being responsible – he discovered a football lying suspiciously near the crime scene – but it was a problem he needed to solve before his wife returned from a business trip.
That was the last time he bought a new television. It still works, but it's small by today's standards, to the extent that it's impossible to read the contents of a ransom note held by a detective in a drama. As TVs have expanded, the ransom notes have got smaller; he often has to pause the programme, get up and put his nose to the screen.
A 50% price hike and a family intervention
On a Monday afternoon, Dowling comes in from his office shed to find his middle son typing furiously on his laptop, with his wife looking on. “Show Dad,” she says. The son explains that their broadband and TV package is ending, and that next month the bill will go up by around 50%. He turns his screen to show the new number, but Dowling is more shocked by the old number he's been paying for two years.
The son says they can renew the contract for the same price, or threaten to quit and hope for a better offer. “Or,” he says, “you can switch to broadband only, buy a smart TV like everyone else and save 70 quid a month.” Dowling asks if it will be big enough to read ransom notes; his son replies, “I don't know what that means.”
Measuring up: the diagonal dispute
Armed with the new project, they all repair to the living room. The middle son begins the tiresome process of extricating them from their present deal, progressing from chatbot to chat human to chat human's supervisor. Dowling's wife starts looking at televisions, suggesting a highly recommended 50-inch model. Dowling extends his tape measure and declares it far too big – but his son points out that it's 50 inches diagonally, not across.
Dowling argues that the convention of measuring screens diagonally is childish, explaining that the first cathode ray tube TV screens were round, so the display size was naturally expressed as the diameter. When the round screen was masked in a rectangular box, the diameter became the diagonal, and the convention persisted for decades because, from a marketing standpoint, it made screens sound bigger than they were. “But now it's like, TVs are huge – who cares?” he says. “Measuring diagonally is childish.” His wife replies, “I'm afraid your father's gone mad.”
The 8mm problem and a new TV
To demonstrate his sanity, Dowling uses a plank from the garden to mark off the exact horizontal capacity of the alcove at TV height: 1,113mm. Looking up the listed dimensions of various 50in tellies, he notes that they actually vary in total width by up to 8mm. His wife asks why they care about 8mm; he says his research shows that 40% of the most highly recommended 50in TVs will not fit in that gap. She leaves the room, and he says “I am pleased” to no one.
The pall he's cast over the whole project persists even after their new broadband-only contract arrives by email. It still hasn't lifted the next afternoon when, all alone, he unboxes the new TV and slides it gently into place, with barely a millimetre to spare either side. He plugs it in and follows the setup process. Then, after double-checking to make sure no one is home, he scrolls through the guide in search of a programme in which someone is kidnapped for ransom.
