Ugh. Please disregard the first message. What I wanted to write is:

In Python 3.1.3, curses.tigetstr() returns bytes (which makes sense), but
curses.tparm() expects a Unicode string as first argument. As a consequence
even the example given in the documentation doesn't work:

>>> from curses import *
>>> setupterm()
>>> tparm(tigetstr("cup"), 5, 3)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: must be string, not bytes