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Serge Diehi with his children, from left, Seefania, 7, Christian, 4, and Eros, 10 |
We apologise for this two- year break in transmission
Residents blame building work on new skyscraper for leaving them in a ‘no-TV zone’
IT’S time to fill in the residents of the Longford housing blocks: Bianca just got engaged in EastEnders, Hull City’s goals against Arsenal were fantastic and Paul Newman was a class act in the rerun of The Colour Of Money on Monday night.
The would-be telly addicts living in the Euston blocks missed it all this week.
In fact, they have missed most of what’s happened on TV for the past two years, with their signal cutting out in the middle of films and big sporting events like the Olympics. It’s impossible to keep up on the soaps.
Residents blame a sudden loss of reception and poor signal on the building site that is growing next door.
It might sound like a complaint straight out of the moan-filled diaries of Carry On star Kenneth Williams. In fact, it’s taking place on the site of the comic’s former home in Osnaburgh Street which has been bulldozed to make way for a new skyscraper of offices and flats designed by Sir Terry Farrell and known locally as Terry’s Tower.
Tenants, who are also fed up with construction noise, said trying to tune into a favourite programme or film has become a gamble.
Sidney Andrews, who has lived in his flat for 12 years and dealt with the problem by buying a Sky subscription, blamed the loss of signal on the cranes overhead.
He said: “It’s really annoying. The Olympics is just an example, but the signal keeps coming and going.”
Francis Rushton, a tenant there for a decade, said: “I’m housebound – this is when you really notice it, it’s really terrible. You just want to sit down, relax and watch a film, but the TV’s buggered.”
After two years of paying their licence fees and extra costs in cable and satellite, residents think the developer should cover the expense.
“I really think they should pay our TV licence,” said Karen Parsons, who lives with her three teenage daughters.
“It’s bad enough having to put up with all the dust and noise but then not having TV reception just makes it so much harder.”
Serge Diehi said his family are often forced to watch DVDs because the telly is so unreliable.
“It’s no good, it’s sad,” said the kitchen porter and father-of-three.
A spokeswoman for British Land, the developers, said they had only been approached by one resident.
In that case, she said they were “very sorry about the time it has taken” to fix her reception.
The spokeswoman added: “No cable or satellite company that we contacted was interested or able to provide a service for the resident.”
The spokeswoman said a residents’ group had not raised television reception as an issue. |
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