SHINY, SHINY

I wasn’t feeling too well the other evening. I think that too many early mornings, too many sleepless nights and too many meals snatched on the fly had finally caught up with me, and I was feeling dizzy and exhausted and in need of a bit of a lie down. So, off I toddled to Bedfordshire at an hour when most small children might be grumbling at the unfairness of the earliness of the hour and I zonked straight out, only to wake a couple of hours later at about the time I would normally head to bed.

So I lay there, trying my best not to think about anything very much and therefore thinking some very strange thoughts. Like the ones about borders and whether we ought to abandon them as they are only artificial constructs created by previous generations and the borders themselves are there more out of habit than anything anyone alive now has done and I (thankfully) started to doze off again only to be struck by a terrible, terrible and yet utterly trivial thought, perhaps more of a “revelation” about the ridiculous number of shiny discs still gathering dust on the shelves, and about what a waste of time and money they’ve turned out to be.

You see, I’d been doing a bit of last minute Christmas shiopping a few days ago and had missed out on what could only be described as an out-and-out bargain, a “once in a lifetime, never to be repeated” offer of the kind that will probably turn up in the sales after Christmas.

I “ummed” and I “aahed” and I resisted, because Christmas shopping really ought to be for other people and not yourself,  and the offer went away after 24 hours and, despite my very best efforts to track it down since, has not reappeared.

So, I missed out on a “bargain”, kicked myself for doing so, and tried very hard to forget about it whilst making a mental note that I should keep half an eye out for something similar and bear that low price in mind before I commit myself.

All well and good and so far, so trivial.

The thing is (and this is where the “revelation” part came in) that the “bargain” was for a complete set of the original series of “Star Trek” that I’ve already owned for quite a number of years and haven’t actually sat down and watched since going through the sets when I first got them as gifts about five years ago. Granted, they’ve been cleaned up a bit, and the so-called “cheesy” old effects shots have been replaced by shiny new CGI versions, but the stories are essentially exactly the same and these shiny new versions aren’t even the original classics that I first enjoyed so much that I asked for them as gifts in the first place.

I’ve done this before.

I’ve bought complete series of shows from the 1960s that I used to know and love, like “The Avengers” and I’ve watched them, put them on the shelf and never watched them again, and then got myself all excited and into “must have” mode when exactly the same shows are re-released in a remastered version with some tatty little “extras” or “VAM” (“Value Added Material”) added that I then buy and don’t even watch.

So I’m going to try and make a promise to myself and resist with all my being the “Special Edition” or the “Fully Remastered” versions from now on. They are essentially exactly the same shows as the ones that I already own anyway. The scripts rarely change all that much, that’s for sure. Oh, people might try and insist that the picture quality has been improved a thousand-fold or that the “new” version makes the perfectly adequate “old” version somehow look drab and slow in comparison but I won’t be holding with any of that old nonsense and, when it comes to “picture quality” well it’s not as if I watch them day after day after day and would be familiar enough with them to make any kind of a real comparison, is it…?

But my fevered dreams also dredged up another knotty problem, that of all the other “complete series box sets” that I once craved for and yearned to watch so much that I had to go out and buy them at full price on the very day they were released into a gullible and eager world, watched once, and then placed upon the shelves never to be viewed again.

What am I doing with four series of “The Sweeney” or nine years of “Seinfeld” anyway? I have at least worked my way through the complete “M*A*S*H” twice, but I can’t ever see me finding the time or the inclination to do it for a third time. “The West Wing” was superb, but when, really when, am I ever going to sit down and work my way through all seven years of that again?

The, of course, there’s the tiny little issue of brand new formats to consider. My spies inform me that Jon Pertwee’s very first “Doctor Who” adventure is about to get the “Blu-Ray” treatment with added “VAM” that won’t be available elsewhere, and the completist in me is already twitching about that, even though I don’t even have a “Blu-Ray” player and I already have it on ancient videotape, another tape recorded off the television, and two DVD releases because it got the “Special Edition” remastered treatment a couple of years ago and sneakily then got itself tied in with another previously unreleased story and so I had to buy one in order to get the other.

Watched it once. Put it on the shelf…

You see, no matter how many times you buy “Alien” or “Star Wars” or a “James Bond” film, and really convince yourself that this time it’s going to be somehow so much “better” this time around than the last time you saw it, when you sit down and watch it, it’s still going to be essentially the same story, told in roughly the same amount of time with perhaps a few less scratches that you hadn’t noticed anyway o the previous version.

So, you see, they really can see me coming and, what with the amount of times I end up going to bed utterly exhausted before the “toddler’s truce” has even been sounded, and what with all the keyboard tapping that I tend to do in my “free” timer anyway, when would I get the chance to watch any of them…?

I should go to be early more often. The “wiser” version of me seems to only surface when I’m sleeping.

As my regular readers will no doubt attest…