I love this story, and it makes total sense to me. An American website (the San Francisco Chronicle to be exact) ran a piece about the demise of TV snow. Not the weathery-type stuff you see Michael Fish telling you won't appear, but the poor picture we all used to get on our TVs. Normally a good bang on the side of the set used to do the trick, but not any more. It's all digital receivers and powerful aerials and satellite dishes. If, like me, you like relatively high up, trying give the satellite dish a good bash cold turn into a Rod Hull-type scenario. But why is this human person lamenting the demise of something that used to be such an annoyance?

Last night, I settled down for some telly watching but was slightly put out by the fact that my aerial was being mucked about by a monsoon-like storm. I kid you not, only QVC seemed to be working ok.

Back in the day, this level of atmospheric pressure meant crackly pictures but today channels just can't be arsed to do anything. That's why I empathised this man's argument on the SFGate website. Consider his argument:

"No wonder there is something comforting about snow. Think back to waking up in front of an old-fashioned analog TV at 2:00 AM, long after the anthem had played and the TV station switched off its transmitter for the night. That snow you saw wasn't noise; it was the universe whispering it's secrets to you while you dozed in it's gentle glow.

Our digital TVs don't display snow. Instead, when the signal fades the image on screen breaks up into a pixel hash of bits resembling nothing so much as a madman's ransom note or an explosion in a silicon confetti factory. Perhaps it has meaning, but I doubt it is anything profound. Maybe someday we will discover that it is alien spam or personal ads floating out from one of the extra-solar planets that astronomers have been discovering lately. Perhaps it is the digital TV muttering nonsense to itself.

This is why I won't throw out my analog TV or retire its rabbit ears any time soon. Analog broadcast has gone mute, but the longest-running TV show in the universe - the cosmic radiation of the Big Bang - is still playing and I might want to tune in from time to time. Maybe it will help me get to sleep some night, and who knows, perhaps the Universe will whisper a secret in my ear."

OK, so he's broadening things out to the whole after-hours thing, when channels would shut down after the national anthem and would either dissolve into a veritable blizzard or switch to an unintentonally scary-looking girl on a test card. Today, with pretty much 24-hour schedules on many channels, we don't get the chance to fall asleep on the sofa, only to be woken up at 3am but a hissing/crackling noise and crawl to your bed ever so slightly freaked out.

But having a knackered TV back then was like having an old, slightly-battered pair of slippers. It's exactly the same argument that raged (and still rages) over the merits of CDs and vinyl. CDs are shiny, new and provide near-perfect sonics, while vinyl is old, ecologically unfriendly and provide too much surface.

Ah, but you see... as one marvellouse person once said, life itself is surface noise.