Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have paid to watch a fat French man’s thrusting buttocks on TV. But something has gone wrong. Despite my attempts to display gallic grinding on the living room screen, my TV is – quite literally – not playing ball.

It’s not what you think. Actually, on reflection, yes it probably is. I had better explain.

This week I participated in an app developer summit hosted in London by Amazon AppStore. At this snappy event, I rubbed shoulders with large numbers of people much smarter than me, mostly men with hipster beards and broad check shirts. It was like I’d stumbled into an ex-pat Canadian lumberjack convention, except without the pressed wild flowers, high-heels, suspenders and bras.

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The venue was one of those trying very hard to appeal to the Tech City lumberjack community but struggling because it was a modern building. This meant it was lacking in the necessary Silicon Roundabout workplace clichés such as exposed brick walls, distressed wooden floorboards and thoroughly upset Victorian kitchen sinks.

To make up for this, it seems someone had hit upon the great idea of removing the ceiling tiles to expose the electrical cabling and air conditioning pipes. Very hipster, I must say. I’ve worked in offices like this before and it’s OK if you don’t mind dust settling on your keyboard and the occasional spider dropping onto your head.

Talking of exposed pipes, it was with some trepidation that I made use of their toilet, fearing that the stripped-away decor might extend here too and that I’d be expected to piss directly into the open sewer.

Anyway, the main focus of the day was on how best to deliver apps for Amazon’s newest television-based products, the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. The former is a smart TV set-top-box, the latter a mini version without the storage and apparently designed for Jeremy Clarkson.

Although it’s obviously outdated, I do enjoy using the term “set-top-box”. The very idea of trying to balance any device with a footprint wider than 10mm on top of a television is ludicrous, and that’s what makes it so satisfyingly retro. It harks back to an age when a TV set occupied the same amount of three-dimensional space in your living room as an armchair.

As a result, TV sets of the past were regarded as items of furniture rather than electrical gadgets. But like a gas boiler, they needed annual servicing by a “TV man” who wore a blue boiler suit marked inexplicably with oil stains. When you switched on the set, all the lights throughout the house would flicker momentarily and an invisible tsunami of static would make your hair stand on end. When I was a child, operating a TV set was like acting out a little Nikola Tesla adventure in your own home. Sometimes there would be sparks. On one memorable occasion, the TV exploded into flames and nearly burnt down the house.

Pyrotechnics aside, old TV sets were often designed with a wonderfully ghastly faux-wood finish to match your parents’ other appalling furniture. They were also given a flat top surface that enabled adults to arrange things on, such as a small lamp, a vase of ugly fake flowers, a Charles-Diana Wedding Commemoration Plate, china dogs and other such items intended for attracting dust away from the vents at the back of the set.

The theory, then, was that any gadget that could plug into your TV set could sit on this flat top. In reality, this never happened. The first mainstream plug-in gadgets for your TV were games consoles and, since TVs in those days only had a single input socket – for the aerial – the devices weren’t kept on top of the TV but locked away in a cupboard. When you wanted to play a game, you’d have to unpack it, switch out the plug at the back of the TV and sit 18 inches away from the bulbous convex screen with the console and cables strewn across the floor as you cultivated cathode ray-induced skin cancer.

Of course, it didn’t stay that way and the introduction of VHS video recorders encouraged TV manufacturers to add a SCART socket to their products. To this day, I find SCART an amazing hardware interface: it must be the only connector capable of gradually expelling its own plug even in zero gravity. Still, given that a VHS recorder in those days weighed more than a family car, no one ever tried to heave one on top of their TV set.

OK, many men have tried. They tried and failed, you ask? They tried and died.

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Then came Pace satellite boxes and Sky boxes and Tivos – all known as “set-top-boxes” but too bulky to actually balance on top of a TV set. By the time smart TV boxes were invented that could comfortably and safely rest on top of a TV set, the latter had ditched CRTs for plasma, LCDs and LEDs and were now blade-thin and couldn’t balance anything on top larger than a penny coin.

So, here I am, here and now and in the modern era, fresh from the app developer summit, armed with a Fire TV Stick and squirming with excitement at the prospect of being able to stream movies using its pre-installed Curzon Home Cinema app. Not Hollywood blockbusters and 3D animated bollox but proper films by real film-makers around the world!

Half-life will like this because she’s French and can’t easily get hold of what we Brits call “art films” but what the rest of the world calls “films”. Nor can she be persuaded to visit an urban art cinema, such as those run by the Curzon group, because she has a loathing of cinemas in general. Uncannily yet verifiably, she always ends up sitting next to someone who’s either morbidly obese, fiddling with a mobile phone, has recently eaten a cemetery or spends the whole two-and-a-half hours sniffing every 17 seconds.

Now she can watch these amazing international movies from the comfort of her own set-top-box… that is, set-rear-stick! So, what shall we watch tonight?

She chooses Welcome to New York, a French film based on the sex scandal in which Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the ex-head of the IMF, failed presidential candidate and “rutting monkey” – just imagine these listed among your LinkedIn skills & endorsements, eh? – was alleged to have procured women of the night and assaulted a chambermaid. Strauss-Kahn was acquitted, curiously having paid a financial settlement to the chambermaid who he hadn’t assaulted, but the story promises a good screenplay.

The film stars an obscure actor called Gérard Depardieu. Apparently he has been in one or two French films before this. When I say “one or two”, of course, I mean “every fucking one ever made”. Famously, John Updike is often quoted as saying: “I think that I shall never view / A French film without Depardieu.”

On a personal, if slightly irrelevant, note, I would like to add: “Around the world and in-between / In all papers and magazines / I don’t believe I’ve ever seen / One without Cara Delevingne.”

Still, it’s my wife’s choice, so here goes.

With the benefit of 25 years of married hindsight, she is doubtful that I will be able to make it work. She is soon proved right. Her low expectations immediately take a further dip as I declare that I want the full cyber experience: I purchase a handful of virtual Amazon Coins, choose the film in the Curzon Home Cinema app and duly pay for it.

My payment is confirmed, a generic pre-movie trailer begins playing… and I make my foolish mistake. There is a button at the bottom of the screen that says “Skip Intro”. I click on it.

The trailer stops and I am booted out to the main menu. No film. Ah, what about the My Films section? No film. What if I search for the film again? There it is but oh… it wants me to buy it again.

Arse.

I contact CHC customer support, who tell me to contact Amazon since they handle all in-app payments.

Arse.

I phone Amazon, who assure me that my payment went through just fine and that I should contact CHC.

Arse.

I fire off a shirty message to CHC to ask them what’s the point of a movie app that lets you buy movies but doesn’t let you watch them, during which Amazon, unsolicited, graciously refunds my Coins and invites me to buy something else.

Props to them, etc, but how am I going to fulfil my promise that we’d spend a pleasant evening watching Gérard Depardieu’s thrusting buttocks? The film’s on Prime but costs twice as much. I may as well try renting it on DVD from my local council library, if such a thing still exists.

Ah well, there’s plenty waiting for us costing nothing via the YouTube app. Let’s watch some kitten videos.

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Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. His next Android app for the Amazon AppStore is still in the planning stage and won’t see the light of day until the new year. He could get it done earlier but he still has a number of kitten videos to get through first.