yes, he was found stuck between the cushions and the back of the couch.....

He was my grandfather.

Well, no, not really.

However, my real grandfather was an Electrical Engineer for Packard Bell and did design a TV back in the day.

So not too far off I suppose.

Although we were too poor to have even a TV much less one with a "remote" I do remember stories of a couple of beauties.
There was the channel changer which used a rubber bulb like an old car horn, a long tube (about 6mm) attached to a small piston/cylinder which ratcheted the turret tuner around. Since Aussie tuners had 13 positions and many rural areas had a choice of only two channels it was a major exercise to 'go round the dial' to get to the previous channel.
The other was the previously mentioned ultra-sonic and in one case the serviceman was driven to distraction trying to trace reports of intermittent channel changing. It turned out to be the housewife using a hand pumped insect spray(you remember the one with DDT!). Apparently the air whistling over the orifice was generating very high frequencies. Now I've got six remotes, I suppose thats progress.
Brian

I had a housemate, briefly, who was a true couch tater. He never learned how to operate the TV without the remote, and barely learned anything of the remote besides power, channel up/down, and volume. Now, not being a sports person at all myself, i had set up the TV so that the up/down channel buttons skipped over all the channels i wasn't interested in, which included all the sports channels as well as shopping networks. His first day in the house, he was complaining that i didn't get ESPN. He sat there flipping through the dozen or so channels muttering about how 14 never showed up. I said, "just press the 1 and 4 buttons on the remote and you'll get it." but he refused to understand. As far as he was concerned, if pressing the up button from 13 went to 22, then we didn't get channels 14 through 21.

One day while cleaning up the living room a bit i put the remote up on the bookshelf so i could dust the coffee table. He didn't see where i put it. So for 4 days, the TV stayed on, on the same channel, at the same volume. Not only was he incapable of looking at the bookshelf to see the remote there, but he couldn't understand that the buttons on the TV itself could be used. Finally one of our friends took pity during one of his visits and picked the remote up off the bookshelf and handed it to him.

Oy.