Orientation, part 3

Mike was working on a project that was supposed to make our home life more pleasant: English-language television. The kids were pretty miserable with only Spanish shows to watch. We’d bought a special VCR—the European video system was different from ours—and brought a lot of tapes with us, but we knew they wouldn’t be interesting forever. Our house had come equipped with a fancy motorized satellite dish that could be moved by remote control to catch various broadcasts, but there wasn’t much in English that we could find. Someone had told Mike that there was a pay-satellite service from the U.K., Sky TV, that could be received in Spain if you had a confederate in England.

Reception of Sky required you to purchase both a decoder box and a Sky TV card. Mike had gotten the box, and he had an American colleague living in London who was willing to buy the Sky card for him. But it wasn’t really permitted to get the Sky signal outside the U.K. Sky prevented this from happening by using a setup procedure in which they called your U.K. phone number and instructed you on how to get the system working.

That meant that we had to have Sky call Andy Dunn, Mike’s London colleague, to give him the instructions while Andy’s wife relayed the instructions to Mike on a separate phone line. So on our second Saturday in Spain Mike was crouching on the TV-room floor, turning dials as Andy’s wife directed.

“Set the tuner to 141.2,” she told him, “and tell me what’s on the screen.”

“It’s blue and purple stripes,” Mike told her, and she told Andy, and Andy told Sky. But half an hour later, awkward as the system was, Mike had accomplished the goal. Now we had a year’s worth of British sitcoms, British weather, and Rupert Murdoch’s view of the news to look forward to!

There was another way to get English on our television: SAP, or secondary audio program. Sometimes, when there was an American TV show broadcast by a Spanish channel, you could press the SAP button on the remote and receive the original English soundtrack. And we even had a very fancy TV that you could use to display closed captioning on the rare occasions when it was available—for instance, when “ER” came to Spain.

The Spanish didn’t start broadcasting “ER” until about a year into its U.S. run, but the newspapers made a big deal about the show’s introduction. El País, the country’s most popular newspaper, said the show moved so fast and had so much overlapping sound that a special service was going to be offered to Spanish viewers: along with the dubbed dialogue, televisions equipped like ours could receive subtitles that would be displayed with a different color for each major actor—blue for Anthony Edwards, pink for Sherry Stringfield, yellow for George Clooney, and green for Eriq LaSalle.

Because Spaniards ate dinner at 10 p.m., prime time didn’t even get started till 11:30 or 12. But I was excited about seeing “ER,” and I stayed up till midnight for the first episode. It was a circus! The show did move along amazingly fast, with the Spanish dialogue going right over my head. My Spanish was good enough by this time that the opportunity to read the multicolored dialogue really helped. It didn’t take long to learn what color represented what character. But the show didn’t end till after 1 a.m. (they showed more commercials in Spain than in the U.S., I guess), so I never stayed up for it again.

The other way to get TV in English was to rent a video from Smith’s. Smith’s was an English shop located on Avenida de Europa, close to the American School. They had a small but decent inventory of English videos that would work on our dual-mode VCR, and you could buy a ten-rental card for about $25. They had a few shelves stocked with English groceries—including such exotica as lemon curd and Marmite—as well as a few racks of English paperbacks and some boxes of candies that Brits preferred, like toffees and Turkish delight. The British girls who worked the counter were friendly, and Smith’s became our home away from home. I began to understand the function that the Indian grocery/video stores in Stamford had performed for the Indian community there.