There’s a guy that we no longer see,
these days he works on Sky TV
and that means his career’s on the skids.
He’s a children’s personality
who bubbles with hilarity
‘cause he’s always far more childish
than the kids.

Above is the opening verse of a comedy ditty about Keith Chegwin by The Tracy Brothers, performed on the Radio 1 series The Mary Whitehouse Experience.

In the series Alexei Sayle’s Stuff, Alexei Sayle told a joke about why all the programmes on satellite television are so old; they start off as the latest trendy sitcom, but it takes so long to beam from space that by the time it hits your television it has turned into I Love Lucy.

At the time neither of the above references made a lot of sense to the majority of the British television public, which makes the fact that today is the twenty-fifth birthday of the Sky network seem all the stranger. It is a relatively young medium, yet there will be people who don’t remember a time that it didn’t exist. My daughter’s generation won’t remember not having the Internet, I can’t imagine black and white television being the norm, but I do remember the days of four television channels. I actually have a vague recollection of the introduction of Channel Four into our homes, but the cultural impact passed me by as I was only little at the time. The thought of big stars making programmes exclusively for a none-terrestrial channel in those days was preposterous, that’s where people go to end their careers!

When my paternal granddad was still alive we used to come back to Nottingham to visit and stay at my grandparent’s house. They had extra television channels provided by a company called Diamond Cable, and their television was magical. The one channel that sticks out in my memory was called Sky; it was the name of one channel among an array of music, film and children’s channels. MTV was possibly another channel, but I can’t remember. In a sensational piece of parental bullshit, I was told that we couldn’t have the extra channels back home in Teesside because it was only available in Nottingham. That might have been true now I think about it, as none of my school friends knew what I was talking about. Diamond Cable eventually became NTL, which then became Virgin Media. Just before Christmas we became a Sky house for the first time ever.

Sky Television launched on this date in 1989 amid a fanfare of publicity mixed with a wave of indifference. In those days of course it was only four extra channels, so it didn’t seem worth all the bother. My parents refused to get it installed because we watched enough crap without giving us more to choose between. For that reason, The DJ Kat Show and the VJ careers of Paul ‘Love And Pride’ King and Ray Cokes remained a mystery that I never got round to solving. There was only one reason to get Sky and that was The Simpsons. The small minority of people at school with Sky got to tell the rest of us about this cool new cartoon series, and the rest of us had to imagine what it might be like (or hope for an invite to go round someone’s house to watch it. The nearest a lot of us got to the residents of Springfield was the music video for ‘Do the Bartman’, which obviously made no sense with no back referencing. These days I make up for that by watching The Simpsons at least four times a day.

Just as there was once a time when you would ask if someone had ‘got the Internet’ and if they ‘were on email’, rather than taking it for granted these days that everybody does in fact ‘have the Internet’, the question of whether someone had Sky was a common one.

In 1989 nobody would have been able to predict what the television landscape would be like twenty five years into the future. We were still recording television onto VHS tapes back then, now we press a button on our TV remote and your telly magically records it for you. Imagine telling someone in 1989 that you could watch television on your mobile phone, they would probably ask why you would ever need to do such a thing rather than telling you that you were an idiot. There’s actually a lot you could bamboozle a 1989 person with; Sky would also provide your phone and Internet (they wouldn’t know what the Internet was either) because British Telecom no longer have the monopoly. Your electricity could be supplied by your gas company and your gas could come from your electricity provider, (although for some reason we still can only get water from the water company), you can carry your computers around with you and sit in cafes sending messages to other computers, if you couldn’t be bothered carrying a laptop (they won’t know what a laptop is) then you could do some of your computer business on a tablet. Try it next time you travel back to 1989, they’ll think you’re talking about paracetamol.

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