DISC ANXIETY

I’ve always enjoyed a bit of good telly. Or at least I thought I did, but recently telly has been rather on the back burner and I’m starting to suspect that I may very well have fallen out of love with it or, perhaps, I’m starting to realise that I haven’t got the time to waste upon slouching around on the couch catching up with all those programmes that I’m not really bothered about watching all that much anyway.

I can’t be, can I? Otherwise I would have watched them by now, wouldn’t I?

Anyway, there’s still; a backlog of box sets on shiny disc to plough my way through, as and when and if I ever get the chance to.

The brave new multi-channel digital world that is so ably juggled using the DVR has started to devour more than its fair share of my free time. Or, at least, you might think it would. However, the DVR is currently over half full of things I still haven’t got around to watching yet and the available space to put new stuff onto it is starting to border on the critical…

A whole stack of “must see” programmes are lurking within its digital memory, waiting for the right moment or a suitably free evening to come along for it to put on its jester’s hat and try, however feebly, to entertain us. “Landmark” dramas from the last half year or so like “The Road to Coronation Street”, “Christopher and his Kind” and that drama from last Christmas about Morecambe and Wise all lurk on there unwatched and, with little time likely to be found to do so, my finger lies twitching over the “delete” button trying to consign them to oblivion but not quite daring to.

Not yet, anyway.

Entire series like “Luther” are just sitting there unwatched and unloved whilst other, simpler fare gets devoured and binned on an almost daily basis. “Luther” was always going to be a hard sell for me as I thought the first series bordered on the preposterous and I only really set it to be recorded because it ended in such a bizarre bonkers way that I thought that I might care how on Earth they chose to sort it out.

It seems that I don’t and my deletion finger hovers once more.

Meanwhile, ongoing new dramas like “Torchwood” and “The Killing” are set to “series link” and are racking up the hours without ever actually tempting me to actually take the time to watch them…

At the same time, the old problem of my almost insatiable desire to acquire old shows on shiny disc shows no sign of abating and seems to be getting worse with the summer sales to tempt me and so the backlog continues to grow at a rate exceeding the available number of hours to actually sit down and watch the ruddy things.

Suddenly there’s a positive stack of boxes just sitting on shelves waiting for the day to come when I can settle down for a nice old fashioned “box set blitz” of some old rubbish that no-one else would really want to watch with me and so the available viewing slots for such things are limited to whenever I’m left alone or suffering my insomnia, caused no doubt in some small part by this very disc anxiety itself, but nowadays I find that there’s always something else that I’d rather be doing with that time than watching a bit of cruddy old TV.

And then, of course, it’s the summer and so the Test Matches devour much of my available weekend hours and I find myself rattling around with the earpieces tuned to 198 LW and unable to sit down in front of the telly, and more possible catch-up time is consumed by the highlights of what I’ve just been listening to, sometimes broadcast whilst they are still actually playing the match itself. Meanwhile the weekday evenings are never easy to schedule as they tend to be swallowed up by shows that are actually on, and personal viewing choices have to fit around them rather than finding their way into the increasingly limited hours left in the DVR memory, or else they must compete with one or other box sets that we know that we will both enjoy, which are the obvious preferential choice over rather some strange old 1970s cop or spy drama or some ancient American show that I start to imagine only an old weirdo like me would ever give house room to…

And I’ve not even begun to consider the backlog of documentaries… or the latest arrival from LoveFilm… or all the books I really need to read…

Thank God I don’t watch any soap operas or talent shows or I’d have to give up the day job just to keep up…