This week, the first region in France will switch over to completely digital television transmission. For the people of the Nord-Cotentin zone around Cherbourg, Wednesday the 18th of November will mark the point where those with analogue equipment will cease to receive any signals. Although this switchover is not scheduled to arrive in Paris until 2011, it seems that are already several victims littering the streets.Television the drug of the nation, or television, window into the nation's psyche? Certainly a home to egos and super-egos, but perhaps less and less a reflection of how each country lives and relaxes. A large percentage of people today spend more time on the internet than they do watching television, and with video on demand or replayed programmes available on the internet after their scheduled slots, fewer and fewer people are watching the same shows at set times.
The principal victim of the digital era though is the old-fashioned television set. With digital signals, the receptor can take any form, right down to a hand-held telephone terminal. The box in this street corner has had its chips. Rejected and thrown out of a warm home, it was too cumbersome and took up too much space in a streamlined world. Final insult, it has been cut open, its guts spilling out across the pavement. A wounded beast, this creature still has its antennae on its shell. Evolution will soon render these useless, leaving this dinosaur alone to a future of fossilisation. The steering coils were merely mortal, the cathode ray tube gunned into surrender. The life-support wires are still plugged in, but the electrons are negative and frequencies getting lower.
Digital television is the brave new world, but is the medium also writing its own testament? Today I get most of my information through the internet, but when I arrived in France in the 1990s, I learned the language and a lot about the country by watching television. The first things I learned were that French television was not good, and that apparently nothing at all happened outside Paris. Almost every programme lasted for a minimum of two hours, and was either stuffy, serious highbrow or desperate, inane lowbrow. Nothing was middlebrow, very little entertained, but it still helped me to improve my French. Today, my television is still a large box in the corner, but I'm not sure I'll bother upgrading.
Ghosts of Christmas past. These buildings are a gift from Ernest Cognacq. His first trading outlet was small change on the Rue de la Monnaie, but his vision was much grander. With his wife, Marie-Louise Jaÿ, Cognacq developed the structure, taking inspiration from the Bon Marché store on the left-bank, and built up a shop of departments, each individually owned and run. He plucked the name from a ghost, the Samaritaine fountain that used to sit on the neighbouring Pont Neuf.
Ghosts of Christmas present, ghosts of Christmas yet to come. Along one side of the store runs the Rue de l’Arbre Sec. Legends tell us that this name refers to the dried wood of the hangman’s gibbet, and the association is apt here. La Samaritaine was condemned to die by its owners LVMH in 2004. It had become too old and dangerous they said. An expensive and time-consuming refit would be necessary to make it fit the required norms, so wouldn’t it be better to hang it out to dry, let time pass and put the buildings to more profitable use.
