Wow, all this shit is real, I really should write my memoirs. I feel so much better. I bet you all had a tribe of Boodadooks at the bottom of the garden too. They kept the dead away (coolest thing ever, we had a cemetery at the bottom of the garden, so a lot of my childhood was spent with dead people who were mildly more animated than my mother during a Brookside omnibus – pedants will probably declare that Brookside started sometime after the era of coin-powered TV, but there was always some soap opera with its claws firmly in my mother's attention*).
The remote was very clacky, not ultrasonic. You could definitely change the channel by clapping. Ironically, when my mum gave me a clap around the ear, I swear the channel would change. Though, let's face it, there were only three back then and we were excited by the debut of Channel 4. No one made that mistake with Channel 5, which they tried (and failed) to make sound exciting by calling it C5. It just made it sound like a vertebra.
A friend of mine at university had a budgie. It was very unwell in a way that could reasonably have been redefined as dead (so wasn't about to change any TV channels). I had a veterinary student girlfriend (it's OK, I'm pretty sure they don't get elbow-deep into anything till the 4th year) and so we all looked to her. Fix the budgie, Kathy! Faced with such peer-pressure and alcohol-smudged commonsense tried to resuscitate it with mouth to beak. Never mix drink and drugs, kids, it's the nucleation point for all kinds of bad ideas (actually, really do it, it's fun). I had trouble kissing her after that. Minimal, admitted, she was ultimately a female and I was twenty. But FIX THE BUDGIE, KATHY! became a firm part of our student lore. Whenever something unpleasant needed to be done we'd yell FIX THE BUDGIE, KATHY! (she didn't have to be there, it sort of helped if she wasn't). It wasn't a long relationship.
*It's not all bad, my mum let me watch all the horror movies with her and she once smuggled me into the Nottingham ABC to watch Jaws. We also both enjoyed Prison Cell Block H. What's a lesbian, mum? Kick me, we didn't have the internet back then. I also spent a while thinking I was the antichrist after The Omen.