I'VE been reading about this new television technology that will give us all much clearer pictures in our living rooms.
High-definition digital on flat panel liquid crystal or plasma screens. That sort of thing. Along with the new generation of huge TV sets wide enough to fill a wall and show the Titanic sideways-on with Southampton receding in its wake and an iceberg lurking just ahead.
No-one will ever need to go to the pictures again because everyone will be able to turn the front room into an Odeon, as long as you can work out where to put the wurlitzer.
"Don't sit there, Ida, or you'll be going up and down at the interval. Sit over by the kitchen door, instead. You can take the ice creams round after the news."
If I had my way, I would have the biggest screen possible, purely for the sport. Soccer, rugby, cricket and ladies beach volleyball spring to mind. But somehow I doubt if my wife Maria will allow me my small indulgence, particularly if it blocks out the light from the front-room window.
The picture quality is supposed to be brilliant on high-definition digital TV but there is one drawback: it will show every blemish on the face of an actor or presenter. Every nook and cranny will be shown like craters on the moon.
You know how you look first thing in a morning when you walk in the bathroom and stare at yourself in the magnified side of the mirror by mistake?
Broken veins, Vesuvian pimples and a nose you seem to have acquired from Coco the Clown? At times, my face has as much detail as a treasure map that Long John Silver would skin me for.
Well, unkind cameras will capture the lot if TV personalities are not careful. So they are being careful and turning to beauty consultants.
The trend started in America, of course, where plastic surgery has been fashionable for decades. But now the in-thing is non-invasive surgery. Lasers are apparently fashionable.
This does not mean you have to do battle with Darth Vader in the hope that you will end up with a neat eyelid-tuck and chin definition. These are different kinds of laser, used deftly by experts without a knife or scalpel in sight.
Treatments range from stimulating collagen production to repairing sun-damaged skin. An uplift to cheekbones or neck is achieved with sutures that are pulled and knotted, with the skin gathered up to provide the kind of result you would usually only get with fully invasive surgery. This is fine as long as a romantic partner isn't carried away by passion and ruffles your sutures so that all of a sudden your face drops to your chest and you age by 100 years.
"Marcia, what happened? You've turned into Norman Bates' mother."
Sociology professor Abigail Saguy thinks our obsession with surgery is unhealthy.
"It's shocking that women are so desperate not to age naturally," she says. "Is it really worth going to these extraordinary lengths just to feel acceptable?"
Film stars have thought so for years and now TV presenters and actors are tipped to follow suit because of new TV technology.
Personally, I shall grow old disgracefully watching sport and ladies beach volleyball in widescreen digital high definition.
