It is a shame that Rishi Sunak went without Sky as a kid. All good parents knew how important a terrestrial TV diet in making wholesome children. Including his, clearly.
You can see how formative all those episodes of Blue Peter were in turning him into the curious, compassionate, creative man he is today.
But I can see in your eyes that you never watched Zoey101, Rishi. I can see it.
Some of us, however, enjoyed the benefits both of Sky TV and the terrestrial channels — and seem to have emerged as morally sound adults. I consider myself one such example.
Meanwhile in my childhood luxury, with a few thumb-clicks of the rubbery turquoise remote, I could switch happily from iCarly to Blue Peter, from Suite Life to Robot Wars and from Hannah Montana to Doctor Who.
In spite of these viewing habits, and that Zoey101 look in my eyes, I think my probity remains intact.
I remember the day we had our Sky dish installed, some time in the mid-late 2000s.
I remember clearly: the workmen heading round the back of our suburban abode to fix the matte-black piece of miniature space hardware to our red brick anterior; just outside our parents’ bedroom.
There, I could — exhilaratingly — inspect it by sticking my head out the bedroom window.
The process was not merely a TV upgrade but a piece of metaphysical surgery. We no longer lived in a two-storey house with a loft conversion. It was now also a cosmically-integrated entertainment system; conversant with the outer reaches of the stratosphere and capable of drawing the finest quality television from distant coordinates in the empty universe — empty, except for the dazzling caches of entertainment and other brilliant messages from America flying around the firmament, just waiting to be fished out of the sky by our brand new dish.
It was an aspirational masterstroke, even as the Sky TV still ran through the classical Red, White, Yellow RCA connectors to our huge, box shaped tube-TV.
(Shamefully, we were late to the plasma-screen revolution. In fact this TV only finally made its way to the dump by catching fire in our living room.)
I am sure the dish’s very essence of aspirationality was proven in the sense of comparison I felt when encountering more impressive iterations of Sky in other middle-class homes.
According to the Great Chain of Being, it was, of course, never possible to keep up with wealthier cousins, friends and family who moved on with carefree abandon to Sky+, Sky+HD, and the (once) obscenely machoistic SkyOne, with 1 terabyte of storage space.
This was a new species of inferiority. Clutching the improved dark-blue remote, scrolling the reformatted (horizontal) TV guide in a relative’s living room; marvelled at the HD channels and the ability to record whatever shows without having to delete 15 episodes of Air Crash Investigation.
The truly amazing thing, however, is how quickly the Sky dishes of yore have come to feel piteously outdated. As TV technology has marched on to an internet-based footing, it is impossible to look at a Sky dish without a sense of aloof embarrassment; like seeing an old photo of yourself, or a cousin you’ve tried to disown at a party.
Driving down many British high streets, one now sees Sky dishes racked up against apartment buildings, like big parasitic coral reefs. We all know everyone’s watching telly on the internet now; if not by plugging laptops in with an HDMI then by using the Prime, Netflix or iPlayer TV apps.
How long will the Sky dishes stay stuck to the side of houses for? Like the entomic TV aerials before them, they now point into wide open space with a doddery — a pitiful and futile — expectation.
Urban driftwood — one day soon a Goldsmiths student will make a sculpture out of you.