The common reaction when someone first learns this is, "My God, even the Ingalls family of 'Little House on the Prairie,' while crossing the Great Plains in a covered wagon, owned more televisions with larger screens than that."

But don't assume that the reason why we have only one television set is because we're anti-television snobs. To prove my lifelong love of television watching I've written down, from memory, the first verse of the Gilligan's Island theme song:

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip/That started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship."

My family's peculiar television circumstances aside, have you noticed an interesting trend in television sets these days? They keep getting bigger. The average size of a television set sold today has roughly the same exterior dimensions as a Nash Rambler sold in 1952, but without getting as good gas mileage.

Also, a television alone is not enough. No. Now the TV is just part of a complete Home Theater System. And you can't just plop a Home Theater System down in the corner of your family room on top of a cheap TV stand you purchased at Wal-Mart, plug it in, and call it a day. Hardly! Nowadays you must have an entire Home Theater built! This allows you to create a total movie theater experience in your own home.

But maybe you think you don't have a spare room in the house that can be dedicated solely for watching movies. If so, then ask yourself, does Grandma really need to have her own bedroom? Wouldn't she be just as comfortable sleeping on a cot in the laundry room?

I recently watched an episode of "This Old House" in which it showed a newly finished Home Theater. This was part of a basement remodeling. I estimate that with the special sound insulation, the wiring, the electronic equipment and the customized furniture, the homeowners must have had to drive a dump truck to their bank to haul away all the money they needed to pay for it. So you can imagine the sort of enjoyable Home Theater experience these people are now looking forward to with such blockbuster hit movie releases this year as, "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" and "Finding Nemo," the animated story of a talking fish. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this family drove out to California, taking with them their new Home Theater System, and threw it, component by component, through the windows of some of Hollywood's biggest movie producers.

Besides making them larger, another recent development in television technology is the broadcast signal sent out by the television stations. In the next few years every station will convert to a digital TV signal. No longer will they broadcast using the primitive analogue signal, first patented by Eli Whitney, and which is, technologically speaking, one step above broadcasting by smoke signals.

The new digital TV signal represents the first major advancement in television broadcasting since the introduction of color TV. (Before color TV, the biggest advancement had been the introduction of black to the original all white television broadcast.) Consumers have reported noticing a tremendous difference when purchasing a new high definition digital TV, in that it costs several times more than their first car did.

As for why my family only owns one, small, analogue signal television set; I'll answer that at the next commercial break.

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