When my grandfather died aged 93 last month the big worry that my grandmother was left with was “how do I program the video?”. They came from a generation for whom afternoon television was a highly improbable technological development, along with driving your own car, more than one telephone in major city (they had the same telephone number for over sixty years of married life), going to the moon, and a woman prime minister (they thought she was rather common). The thing about watching “the box” during the afternoon was that it was also highly immoral which is a problem if the Daily Telegraph crossword and Richard Whitely and Carol Vodermann’s Countdown are your major pre-occupations. So what do you think that the video recorder was invented for? It’s all about freedom of choice, and their choice was the latest state of the art rental TV, cocktails at seven (two very stiff gins), dinner at seven thirty (we don’t keep wine in the house) and then Countdown but only after the washing up has been done (almost as unexpected as driving your own car).

My choice, on the other hand was to get those flashing green numbers in my front room show the right time for the first time in my life shortly after the dawn of the new millennium. After reading Loaded in the doctor’s waiting room I think I might be ready for something bigger than 14″ soon and perhaps a subscription to some dodgy cable channels but then again I’d rather buy a new computer to put next to my Macintosh IIfx (£5000 in 1992), my Power PC 8100/100 (£3500 in 1995) and my daughter’s pink iMac (£1000 in 1999). The great thing about Wednesday nights is that after the princess is tucked up in bed and we’ve had supper with more chilli than is really good for us, I can take the rest of the wine down to the basement and tap away at a computer (the pink one) while mad fashion bitch watches the e.r. double bill of heart stopping gore (I can’t stand the sight of blood).

The point of these two moving domestic scenarios is to show that choice is alive and well in the land of old media and that breadth of the choice is not defined by the number of channels on the remote or the bandwidth of my free ISP connection, but by the number of different media that we have access. My grandparents favourite “portal” was the large picture window overlooking the golf course, while my main source of news and information must be the toilet with a view of the plaster works, the car body workshop, the council yard and the local park. My idea of a multimedia experience is finding a repeat of Reginald Perrin on BBC 2, staying up to watch Barbarella (again) but falling asleep and being awoken by the 0898 chatback ad (how do they make it so loud?).

So where does that put interactive TV in the big plan of my big dreams? Who will be the first to sign up for ntl or open? Me or my grandmother? And why do they all have logos spelt out in lower case letters? is it something to do with the early modernist’s distrust of the hierarchical patriarchal capital letter? The typeface futura was originally designed with no capital letters. I suspect underhand motives but then again I usually do; perhaps that’s what my granny taught me. I can sense the excitement of the protagonists in the iTV/TVi race; which came first? The independence or the interaction? Finally advertising agencies are going to get a Trojan horse into the homes of the audience which they have been blindly pounding with .com heavy artillery from every angle; TV ads, billboards, bus sides, magazine spreads but not, interestingly, the internet. But once they gain access to the Englishman’s castle what will they find there? Will there be anything worth stealing?

Sorry about all those questions. Here are the answers: nowhere, neither, nonsense, it’s not who came first but who is left standing, nothing, and yes, there is plenty of gold to be found in the hearts of folk, if only you have patience and you don’t think you know what you’re looking for.