Years ago when I was playing bars, one of the ones we performed in on a regular basis, got a large screen tv.

The funny thing was that it used the same remote control unit as the one I had at home. We put up with this tv set for two nights as it distracted the audience away from what I naively thought was the focal point --the band. The bartender refused to turn the sound down when we went on to play.

Finally on the third night, I decided to bring the remote from home with me to the gig. I had it discretely off to the side of one of my synths, and it wasn't visible from stage to anyone in the audience. I had it aimed directly at the club's tv set. Before going on stage to begin our set, I asked the bartender to lower the volume out of consideration for the band, and tried to impress upon him that there were in fact regulars in the club who wanted to hear us. He ignored me.

We went on stage, got about a minute and half into the first tune and with my left hand, muted the volume. Patrons at the bar complained to the bartender. He got his remote and un-muted it. I let this go for another 2 or 3 minutes, and then muted it again from my end. This process went on for all the first set. Bartender couldn't figure out what was wrong with the set. (We were trying to keep from pissing ourselves on stage and giving ourselves away.) Finally when we started the second set, instead of hitting the mute button, I was just turning off the set instead (and the bartender would keep turning it back on.) This went on over and over during the second set, and finally the bartender decided there was something wrong with the tv, turned it off and put an "out of order" sign on it.

We finished off the week with no further problems with the tv as it remained "out of order". No one clued into the fact that there were only problems with the tv set when the band arrived. Go figure.

We stopped gigging right around the time sports bars with multiple tvs were just coming into acceptance. Good thing too. Would have had to build some sort of rack mounted do-hickey to house all the remotes I would have needed to control ALL the multiple tv sets in these clubs. (Thanks for this thread. I hadn't thought about this in years!)