Ges on the Box: Daughter of TV darkness

YOU do your best, don’t you?

Give birth — and not always at the most convenient time, either.

When daughter number one decided to make her debut — impatient as always— I was in the middle of a Tupperware party. At least there were plenty of containers for the boiled water.

Then it’s sacrifice after sacrifice — bedtime stories (I lost count of how many times I read “Little Miss Naughty”, but it was in the millions, I’m sure), spoiled dinners, sleepless nights.

You scrimp and scrape to buy the clothes peer pressure makes them want — velour trouser suits, white sandals, pedal pushers (look, she IS 34, I’ve just got a long memory). And what about the technology? We queued for seven hours to get her the very latest Apricot computer one Christmas

We even learned how to use it, well, her dad did, I’ve never really got the hang of these computers. Give me a typewriter any day — preferably the one I bought her when she was seven. It was an Olivetti, the latest thing in swish.

During all (three) of her formative years I tried to instill in her my sense of right and wrong, of priorities . . . heck, of the things that I hold most dear in life.

Like the importance of plain chocolate vs milk; the rights and wrongs of going overdrawn; the necessity of saving for a good colour and cut every five weeks.

And how does she repay me, this one and only daughter or mine? By getting rid of her telly. That’s how.

I’ve been spending a week down in sunny Bedford with her and my grandchildren (oh, how nice it is to see the elder one enter puberty with all the slammed doors and raging hormones that that entails. Revenge is sweet) only to discover that she has no TV.

Not even one sneakily hidden in a wardrobe for emergencies, I know, I looked.

“We don’t need one,” she airily waves away my concern. “They only watch rubbish on it anyway so we talk, read books, play board games. . . “

Has she no soul? No sense of values?

Does she not believe in the BBC, our greatest institution; in ITV, our greatest entertainer?

In a word: no.

She doesn’t even believe in “Coronation Street”. So here I am: I don’t know what Molly and Kevin have been up to. Can I carry on in ignorance of Becky’s fate? Why has Liz gained an extra three stones, is she pregnant? What has happened to Slug?

Look, sorry, I’ve got to go . . . I’m back up in dear, wonderful, beloved Oldham and the Corrie omnibus is just about to begin . . .