Normally, I am very slow off the mark when it comes to new gadgets and technology. Partly, this is because I'm mean and know the price is sure to fall soon, and partly it's because I live in Chipping Norton, where there are no new gadgets and technology. People here still point at corduroy.

Mostly, however, it's because I've learned from past mistakes. I, for instance, was one of the seven people who bought a Philips laser disc. It was idiotically expensive, and if something moved quickly across the screen, it ghosted, so that the scene ended up looking like an early Queen pop video.

Then there was a grey box I bought while cruising the Tottenham Court Road. You plugged it into your computer, inserted a disc, and it would copy any file from your hard drive. I was immensely pleased with this, right up to the point when someone pointed out that the computer itself could perform this task. And had been able to since about 1992.

This is why I didn't rush to leap on the plasma TV bandwagon. God, they looked good and, wow, the picture was sharp. But initially, they cost about £2.5billion, and they had a habit of blowing up every five months. This is annoying. And expensive.

I therefore waited until the reliability gremlins were sorted out and the price had come down to a still preposterous £1,500. And then in I went, choosing a 42-inch JVC.

Gosh, it looked fine, sitting in a specially made hole I'd created in the bookcase. And it continued to look fine until I turned it on.

The picture had a tie-die Haight-Ashbury quality to it, and that was bad enough, but worse, the sound came along ages after the picture.

That's OK if you're watching an artillery bombardment from a few miles away - you expect it. And it's OK if you're watching a commercial for Odour Eaters. But it's emphatically not OK when you're watching the weather forecast. And what you're hearing is some bint from the local news programme that's just finished.

Imagining this might be a cabling problem, I called out the man from the shop who fiddled around, said he'd mended it and went away. That night I listened to Silent Witness while watching Stephen Fry on QI.

So I called the man out again and still he said there was nothing wrong, even though Stephen Fry seemed to be wearing an oscillating electro-suit. Which he wasn't. And we were listening to Alexander Graham Bell saying, "Come here Mr Watson, I want you".

Well that's what I think he said; it's hard to be sure because the £1,500 JVC comes with the sort of speaker you expect to find in a musical birthday card.

Eventually, I decided that the only solution was to buy another television so I went back to the shop and found that in the last year, things have moved on in a sort of gigantic triple jump. Plasma has been replaced with LCD which only works up to 42in, and not at all if you're not directly in front of it.

And now you will be steered toward something called 'high definition'. It looks great in the shop. But this is a test signal. The number of programmes broadcast in this shiny new way is tiny, because it's so expensive. On Top Gear, we reckon that shooting in high-def would add 20 per cent to the budget. Simply to survive, we'd have to eat James May.