SEVENOAKS: I think I speak for all of us when I say that it's a poor show. In every sense of the word.

Why are they taking their time to turn us digital?

As far as I can tell from asking friends and relatives round the country, the only places that don't yet get a digital signal through their TV aerials are Sevenoaks and a lighthouse near Scapa Flow.

"Oh, we've been able to get Freeview for years," people say. "Not you? Gosh, I'd have thought Sevenoaks would have been one of the first places to go digital."

Me too. This close to London, you'd think there would be digital transmitters marching over the North Downs like an Entmoot.

Every few weeks I type my postcode into the when-will-digital-get-here site, and it keeps saying "2012".

Is that before or after the Olympics? Are we Sennockians doomed to have three glum weeks with presenters urging the country to "press the red button NOW to view Usain Bolt's gold-medal sprint from every direction including underneath," while we sit there glaring at Hazel Irvine and a football match between Fiji and French Guiana?

It's bad enough here in 2009. At the end of just about every programme, someone makes a bright suggestion that we turn to BBC 3, or More 4 or something else that's denied to the citizens of Sevenoaks.

What rubs salt into the wound – in this household, anyway – is the fact that we actually do have a red button to press.

We've got a black digibox, impulse-purchased from Tesco when they had the things stacked to the ceiling more than a year ago.

"They wouldn't be selling digiboxes locally if we couldn't get digital, would they?" we said.

Well, all I can say is I'm surprised they're not selling us ice-skates and saddles for camels.

The digibox, plugged in, offers us the occasional flicker of Dave or QVC, then freezes into a Paul Klee painting and eventually a cold blue screen with the words 'No signal'.

For households with a satellite dish, there shouldn't be much of a problem.

We have a satellite dish.

It's connected to the telly we never use.

We never use it because to get it working involves an assortment of mysterious black boxes, DVD players and phone lines, all of which have to be activated in a precise, non- intuitive sequence. There are five separate handsets, each of which must be used at some point in the process.

If we ever got it working, the instruction "press the red button" would have us madly punching handsets at random and ending up with a screen full of German blondes imploring us to dial a number in Mönchengladbach.

The television, needless to say, can only be used if one of our offspring is at home and can spare the time to help the old folks get to E4 or ITV2.

All I ask is that the little kitchen telly – the only one that's ever used – can get me to those mystical places that the rest of the country seem to be taking for granted.

Five News… the Promised Land.