10.16.2009 — I thought my mom was just being a baby when her VCR finally gave out last month and she had to get a DVR.

"Could there be any more buttons on the remote control?" she lamented.

Turns out, Mom's in good company.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, can't work the damn remote either.

"To work out how to operate a television set you practically have to make love to the thing," the 88-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth says. "And why can't you have a handset that people who are not 10 years old can actually read?"

His remarks (captured in the YouTube video shown below) were made in an interview celebrating the 50th anniversary of a Design Council prize in his name.

In addition to remote controls, the Duke rails on TVs with their low-set controls.

"You used to put it on the floor, and then they put the controls on the bottom so you had to lie on the floor, and then if you wanted to record something the recorder was underneath," he says.

"So you ended up lying on the floor with a torch [that's British for flashlight] in your teeth, a magnifying glass and an instruction book [that's old people's talk for tech support]."

So is Prince Philip praising or deriding the public when he proclaims, "I think people are very tolerant, the way they go on tolerating these ghastly things."?

Then again, this is the guy whose indelicate comments include: "British women can't cook" and "If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

[via Telegraph]