While American remote controls just perform banal tasks like turning the tv on and off and changing the channel, apparently their French counterparts can pilot the space shuttle.
After borrowing a tv and carrying it home on the bus, I discovered that it gets one channel which seems to show nothing but military or prison dramas interspersed with Euroshopping (QVC with an EU flag), occasional blocks of Friends and a film starring Michael J. Fox in which he has the power to talk to ghosts.
Enlightening as this quality programming sounds, I long for news, the channel arte, un diner presque parfait and les guignols. When I complain to French people about my one crap channel, they all ask if I have a remote. By now, few instances of French surrealist logic suprise me, but this was a new entree on the menu, or should I say, carte.
When I say no, I don't have a remote, they sagely nod and say, ah, that's the problem. Apparently, French remote controls identify all the channels your tv gets and then automatically memorize them and allow you to access them easily.
You don't think it would help if I got an antenna, I ask, and then I'd get more channels? Mais non, they say bemusedly, that wouldn't help at all. Since the nuances of setting up the French television clearly escape me, they explain that if you have a cable plugged into the tv and the wall (which I do, but only after a French person came to my house and identified the right outlet for me), that's the antenna and possibly means you get cable.
I guess rabbit ears are a thing of the past and telecommandes are the way of the future. France is no technological slouch, you know. They did, after all, invent credit cards with microchips in them.
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