First it was the water which had to be fitted with a stupid advance payment meter calculated to run out at the most inconvenient times. Then it was the electricity meter that had to be moved outdoors at my expense. Then it was the telephone, cut off along with the Internet when the telegraph pole in front of the house was moved. So why should I have been surprised when the screen that has been showing BBC courtesy of Digiturk for the last nine years recently went blank?Unlike the others, this was a problem that crept up on me. First the schedule vanished from the listings. Then BBC World acquired an irritating crackle, rather as if it were endlessly trying to clear its throat. Then right in the middle of “Hotel Babylon” (a repeat, of course, so it didn’t much matter) suddenly BBC Entertainment vanished, to be replaced by a message informing me that the connection to the satellite had been lost. By the next day that too had gone, taking with it both the BBC channels.
I can’t say I was that bothered at first. Favorite television programs are a bit like comfort food and it’s sad to have them snatched away, but at this time of year with the sun shining and lots of people about there really are better things to be doing with one’s time than wasting it on reruns of “The Weakest Link.”
But after five days I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms. “Have you lost BBC from Digiturk?” I asked a friend.
“Yes,” she said. “They probably haven’t paid their bills.”
Having read something about the increasing cost to Digiturk of buying in content, I too harbored suspicions along the same lines, although the conspiracy theorist inside me also wondered whether it might have something to do with the fact that the BBC is still showing cigarettes in all their naughty glory without the maddening blots added by the other channels.
The Digiturk website had nothing to say on the subject. Nor did the BBC come to that. But on one of the Living in Turkey forums I got the general idea that something -- a cable? A card? -- needed to be changed. There was also alarming talk about the need to reboot. The only solution was to go to Nevşehir and ask to be shown what to do. The man there was all smiles, probably remembering me as the dummy who’d come in to buy a new remote control device when all I needed to do was press the Digiturk button on the old one. “You need a new cable,” he said with a grin. “Will after two o’clock be OK?”
So simple! The work was complete in 10 minutes, even allowing for the need to vault from the top of a too short ladder onto the roof. The new reception judders much more than it used to but otherwise the Beeb is back. Now all I need to do is get onto Türk Telekom about the phone which was working for a few days and now isn’t all over again.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
