BOX SET BLUES

Because I am weak and feeble-minded, I appear to have accumulated a lot of box sets lately,  sometimes for the most pathetic of reasons - like the fact that they were set in California, or because the logging trucks I saw on the roads there made me think of the series - but am beginning to wonder if I'll ever get the chance to actually find the time to watch any of them, given that there's now a stack of at least five - possibly six - of the things waiting for my attention, and buggerall free time to sit down and view them, nor a comfortable place in which to do the sitting and viewing, now that - in anticipation of the great (construction) works ahead of us - we've thrown out the collapsing leather couch and I appear to be living like a student once again, despite my great age.

"There's only the rickety chair…"

And yet, even as I write, with this wall of wasted time still to be climbed, the January Sales loom large on the horizon, and with them will no doubt come even more temptations to acquire yet more pointless stuff, which, in most cases, simply become more desirable because they're cheap…

"Oh, I'd definitely want that if it was cheap enough…"

These days, it's the English way of doing things - I don't care what it is, so long as it's a bargain...

And then, usually after only one viewing, most of them get put on a shelf to gather dust and almost certainly never see the light of a laser again, even though I appear to gain some small comfort from knowing that they are there and I could watch them at any time I wanted.

But it's madness.

I mean... who really has the time…?

There's a ludicrous amount of viewing on those shelves, pretty much all of which has been watched about once, and will I ever really get another chance to trawl my way through the complete run of "NYPD: Blue" or "M*A*S*H" or "The West Wing" or "Millennium" or "Blakes 7" or "UFO" or "Inspector Morse" or "Seinfeld" or "The Sweeney" or "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits" or any of those other shows again given the nature of my lifestyle…?

And that's not even thinking about all of the films...

Well, maybe when I retire, but, well, the way things are going these days (and genetically speaking) sometimes that seems increasingly unlikely.

Meanwhile, in the wee small hours, and whenever I'm abandoned for the evening for the Beloved to attend yet another of her many, many work Christmas functions, I'm working my way surreptitiously through a frankly brilliant thirty-part drama series (plus feature-film sequel) from the early nineties ("The Owls Are Not What They Seem..." - if you know what I mean...?) with a slightly more crappy "complete series box set" of a rather less impressive (but happily remembered and fun!) 1970s series, which will annoy the heck out of me when I finally settle down to watch it, but will nevertheless be endured episode-by-episode in their proper order until the bitter end by the completist in me.

However, there's that really special, special offer (that I bought from the BFI a couple of months back) to also slip into the schedule, a series which really deserves to be savoured, especially at the time of year for which it was intended.

But then there's the "Black Friday" deal of that collection of eight 1930s movies to find time for, not to mention the other twenty-odd movie collection that I ordered in a weak-minded moment because I was determined to hang on until I could find it at the stupidly cheap deal price that I'd missed out on, and was surprised one day not long afterwards to be able to do so, and then simply could not resist it any longer.

Then there's the shiny new release of this year's series of another show that I adore, even though I only watched it a couple of months ago, plus of course, in all these cases, more "Extras" or "VAM" than anyone could reasonably expect to be able to sit through in merely one lifetime.

Finally, there's also the tricky little matter of finding a couple of hours to make my (almost) annual trip to Bedford Falls, which is another place that the Beloved prefers not to venture into because she finds it far too upsetting, and so I have to blub alone, in the darkness, before the rest of the household awakens.

First world problems, eh...? First world problems...

This in an era when I'm actually watching less and less television anyway, so I'm obviously just an accumulator out of habit more than anything else, and lucky enough, I suppose, to still be in a position to be one when others are struggling so much, so I should probably just shut up and stop complaining now.

No, really.

God, this is utter madness, isn't it…?

KIND OF BLU-RAY

Oh dear… It seems I did a bad thing…

And the funny thing is that, even though it cost only just over six of your British pounds, and seemed to be a complete bargain at that ridiculously low price, even when I clicked that “buy now” icon, I knew that it was a bad thing and that, when it arrived, I would probably be in a great deal of trouble for wasting my money on something that, to all intents and purposes, I had already bought three times over, twice on video, and once again on DVD…

Although, to be fair, one of those times wasn’t actually me, but these kinds of things do happen when you combine your lives and your film collections…

But you see I did say that I wasn’t going to get sucked into this shiny new format, and that I really couldn’t see the point of it. After all, no matter what film it is, it’s still the same movie, whatever format that it’s released on. A bad film, with a lousy script and some awful performances in it, isn’t going to get any “better” just because it’s on Blu-Ray, (although the ones I bought are none of those...)

And I guess that it’s going to be a dead format pretty soon anyway, given that new computing devices seem to be moving away from having disk drives and the average consumer is happy enough to steam any old quality of nonsense...

But ever since I got the wretched device, for reasons I once described to you that did not involve the playing of any shiny discs whatsoever, I have kind of been intrigued as to quite how different the images viewed upon it might actually look.

I could, of course, have just rented something to find that out, but then this “bargain” popped up… and it was one of my favourites (actually, it was four of my favourites…) … and it is one of the very few films that I could honestly say with any certainty that I’d probably watch over again more than once…

I have, of course, been trying to persuade anyone who’ll listen (i.e. not very many people at all) that Blu-Ray really does seem to be a format too far, that it serves no purpose unless you have the kind of TV set of the size which could entertain an arena, and that it seems anachronistic and will probably go the way of the Betamax videotape any day now, but such is my utter hypocrisy that I have now, in a small way, been sucked into its clutches and must resist the urge to buy everything that I already own and fail to re-watch on yet another format…

To be fair, in most cases, I am finding it very easy to resist, but I have now crossed a rubicon and the marketing bots know of this chink in the armour of my fortress and they will no doubt be doing their level best to gnaw away at my shallowness and suck me in to their horrific world of exponential sales potential.

We have, after all, been here before.

Those early days of the original shiny discs when I said that I’d just get one to “see what they look like…” which turned into an obsessive surge of acquisition…

But those were wealthier days, and the novelty of all those “interesting” extras gave me more reasons to find excuses to persuade myself that such things were “essential” in some small way, but, apart from an improved picture quality that I can barely perceive, what additional improvement can this relatively new format give me that all of the shiny discs that I already have can’t…?

And so the internal battle commences…

THE LATEST THING

I am, I suppose, not the most “cutting” edge of people when it comes to matters of new technology.  I don’t go out and buy the “latest thing” because (1) I can seldom afford it and (2) I tend to think that these days the “latest thing” tends to hang around for about two months before being superseded by the next “latest thing…”

So why exactly am I mentioning this today, you are perhaps wondering…?

Well, boys and girls, today I am mostly annoyed with my online DVD rental company.

We’ve been with them for about five years now, if not longer. Ever since, in fact, we decided that our (or rather my) accumulation of bought shiny discs was bordering on the ridiculous and that renting instead of buying might mean that we didn’t disappear under a pile of shiny plastic once the shelf space started to run out.

“Oh yes… So how did that work out for you, then…?”

“Not so well”, he said, emerging from under that very pile… But I suppose it did take a little longer than it might have done and we were able to sort of at least some of the chaff before we decided to part with our hard-earned.

Anyway, that’s not why I’m annoyed with them.  No, I’m annoyed with them because yesterday we finished watching season three of an old TV show which lasted five-seasons, and I went to add year four to the rental list (because you don’t want the computerised selection process to ever send you the years out of order, do you?) only to find that it was now only available as a download.

It was year two of “Dollhouse” all over again.

Now I know that this is the modern way, just as I know that we’ve already looked into the possibility of going down the download route and chosen to reject it.

You see, we accumulate TV on our own apparently incompatible (because we bought it too early) digital recording device at an alarming rate as it is, and it just sits there, waiting to be caught up with at some, as yet undefined, future point. If we go down the download route, we’ll just accumulate more of that kind of thing whereas the arrival of the disc always used to prompt us to switch off, calm down, settle ourselves in front of the TV and actually watch the bloody thing.

More annoying, I suppose, is the presumption involved of the whole thing. We liked things to be on shiny disc. I still do, to be perfectly honest with you. Just as I still want to be able to buy my music in a physical form. Having those discs arrive through the post kind of worked for us. But the company we use seem to think that everyone must by now have a PlayStation or a Wii or a Smart TV or a Blu-Ray player or the latest in laptop or tablet technology and, you see, we actually have none of these things, and, the part of me which rails against the continuous march of new technology adding to the pile of crap we’re going to leave behind us when we go, why the hell should I have these things?

We did consider trying to hook up the laptop to the TV as per suggestion only to find that it pre-dates such exciting developments and was probably bought an entire three months too early (you never can buy a gizmo at precisely the right moment, can you?) and so will require many other bits and bobs attaching to it, none of which (if you read the reviews) are guaranteed to succeed.

There is one other option we have, although that too requires yet another lead to be bought, and that involves making a portable device unavailable for the duration of the film and taking out another brand new account which would then need combining with the old one and which, quite frankly is taking a bloody liberty.

I know that I really ought to embrace the future, but these people with their “one size fits all” notions of the world really, really annoy me, and I do think that cancelling the account might be the best way to go, after all, I don’t think that they want the likes of me as a customer any more anyway.

It’s not as if we haven’t got anything else to watch, after all…

NEW OLD WHO

Yesterday there occurred a very, very rare occasion indeed because, thanks to the efforts of Mr Postman, the mail order company, and the publishers of a rather fine product, I was able to watch a classic-era “Doctor Who” episode that I had never seen before…

Okay, when I say “never” that’s perhaps not strictly true…

There is, after all, an outside chance that on the 25th of September 1965, I was sitting in my pram when the programme was on and I drank in every second, but I think that it’s pretty unlikely given that I was slightly over a year old at the time.

Anyway, the point is that, back in the day and as soon as I got the opportunity to do so, I hovered up every single release of “Doctor Who” that there ever was on “official” videotape, despite the fact that, even in those days, there were vast quantities of episodes which no longer existed in any format in the archives.

Ditched… Junked… Wiped… Gone forever…

Then, about ten years ago, another one turned up which had Daleks in it and it made its way swiftly onto a DVD release and that was the first “new” episode that I’d seen since my first look at “The Reign of Terror” as it finally slipped out onto videotape towards the end of the release schedule.

Then, another ten years of nothing new turning up.

No new discoveries, no miraculous “finds” lurking in the back of an archive somewhere.

Then, at the back end of 2011, two more popped up. “Airlock” which was episode three of the serial “Galaxy Four” and which starred William Hartnell, and episode two of “The Underwater Menace”, the earliest Patrick Troughton episode yet discovered. Neither of them are quite the kind of “classics” that fans are hoping will magically reappear one day, but two solid examples that did their bit to chip away at the vast edifice of “missing” episodes which seems to be eking down, decade by decade, towards the “only” two digits mark.

One of them is yet to be scheduled for release to the general public, although it has been shown at one or two of the BFI “Missing Believed Wiped” events, so some more dedicated fans than I am have actually been able to see it, but the other one, “Airlock”, finally made its debut on shiny disc this very weekend and, once it popped through my letter-box, I was able to rip off the cellophane and park myself in front of the TV set and wallow in a 25 minute miracle, in which Mr Hartnell showed what a surprisingly spry old bird he actually was at that point, and Mr Purves had surprisingly big hair.

Granted, as far as “miracles” go, it probably wouldn’t mean all that much to the majority of you, but for me it was just a tiny bit of heaven (even though it would never be likely to become a favourite tale - I am still rather glad that it turned up), and another piece in the jigsaw of hope that one day I might just settle down and be able to finally watch all seven parts of “The Evil of the Daleks” instead of just the one, or all of “The Web of Fear” or, perhaps, a complete version of “The Tenth Planet…”

Well, you never know… We live in hope and all that.

Still, I know that “out there” people are still looking, and, whilst few of us believe that anything new will turn up after all this time, it seems that they sometimes do, and I can only hope that someone is on hand when they finally clear out all of the cupboards at the back of Television Centre as they finally start to redevelop it…

“Keep ’em peeled…!”

SPY NIGHT

Perhaps it was a mistake to watch “Skyfall” for the second time on the very same evening I watched “The Bourne Legacy” for the first, but that’s the nature of shiny disc-dom; You get a random rental which arrives on the previous day to the one you pre-ordered off the internet (only to find that the supermarkets are then flogging it at half the price you paid – so much for “pre-order discounts…”) and, because of various factors, you’re then stuck with the dilemma of which to watch first…

The shiny new thing that you’ve actually spent your own money on, but which you saw so very recently in the cinema that nothing’s likely to come as much of a surprise, or the one you’ve never seen, started watching the day it came but was far too tired to appreciate, and which is a rental and so it really ought to go back as soon as possible so that they can despatch another one and you get something approaching your “money’s worth” this month…

Somehow though, you then actually manage keep yourself awake long enough on a Saturday evening to see both, whilst the other rental disc, the one that arrived two weeks earlier but which you really haven’t been in the mood for, sits there lonely and unloved in the envelope, and you constantly hear a soft shrill voice shouting in the manner of a fly-headed scientist caught in a web…

“Watch me! Watch me!”

Which is merely the sound of my own guilt constantly nibbling away at the back of my subconscious mind.

Watching the two films back-to-back really did give me pause for thought. Both of these films start off rather slowly, in fact, the first time that I tried to watch the Bourne film, I gave up after half an hour because I was feeling so very sleepy. Still, second time around it escalated into a rattlingly fast-paced yarn which was all rather enjoyable.

This observation of “slowness” might seem an unusual observation, especially with regards to “Skyfall” which opens with an escalating chase sequence which has had the critics and the general public raving, but the high-octane ending of “The Bourne Legacy” really made the pace of “Skyfall” seem pedestrian at first, once we’d switched the discs over, although the pace does pick up after the attack on the board of enquiry room…

Mind you, I thought that the first half seemed rather slow in the cinema too. The Bond films, I’ve always felt, have always seemed rather too pleased with their stunt sequences and do rather tend to dwell upon them, whereas other films of that ilk seem to treat those sequences in a rather cavalier and throwaway fashion which does tend to keep the pace rattling along more quickly…

I had a similar problem with the l-o-o-o-n-g boat chase sequence at the start of “The World Is Not Enough” over a decade ago, although I put that down to finding London to be a rather drab and shabby place on film, although I suppose that’s perhaps got something to do with over-familiarity, and London might seem exotic and mysterious if you’re watching a film in Islamabad.

It’s not that I think “Skyfall” is a “bad” film or, for that matter, that the Bourne one is a “good” one, but it was interesting to watch them both “back-to-back” as it were when I wasn’t really expecting to and make the comparison between two different film franchises which cover broadly the same ground.

Of course the plots of both of these films make no sense at all, but, then again, the plots of this kind of movie seldom do anyway when you actually start to think about them... “Skyfall” in particular suffers from the “over-convoluted plot” syndrome in that a heck of a lot of pre-planning has to fall into place for the plot to even be possible whilst another character gains easy access to the home of the main target very simply quite early on and you wonder why the villain didn’t just try doing that...

In fact there are a few moments where you find yourself almost screaming at the screen (well, I was at home this time…) things like “If he can substitute himself for a chauffeur, why didn’t you…?”

And, of course, the person who ends up being the main victim in the film only does so because of an act of random chance and this leads to a rare failure for the lead character which is dressed up in all the trappings of success, because after all, we need our “heroes” to be “successful”, don’t we…?

Daniel Craig is an oddly shaped chap though, isn’t he…?

You only have to look at the silhouette on the cover of the DVD to realise that, and that slow walk towards the camera at the start of the film does rather emphasise it, too. But, I reaise that a lot of people actually seem to like his peculiar shape (Personally, Clive James’ description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “condom stuff full of walnuts” springs to mind) so I suppose that, once again, I’m getting that wrong in comparison to everyone else’s opinion.

Back to my own DVD purchase, and I suspect that, on another day, I might have been posting giddily something tiresome like “It’s arrived…! It’s arrived!” about my “Skyfall” disc, but, you’ll have happily discovered, I chose not to do that.

Well, until now, anyway…

After all, I’ve always been inclined towards completing my Bond film collection as quickly as possible whenever a new one comes out, but they still only sit on a shelf and gather dust once I’ve done so, so perhaps it’s time that I grew up and stopped being so easily led…

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…

MEDIAPEEL 0.1

I’ve always enjoyed a good Alfred Hitchcock movie. For many film fans he remains “the guv’nor” despite the fact that all of his work predates “Star Wars” and therefore, for a lot of film studies courses, simply fails to register on the radar any more. This, to me, is like teaching history whilst discounting everything that happened before the Second World War, but I suspect that there’s a fair amount of that going on nowadays, too.

Over the course of his long career, Mr Hitchcock directed a huge number of classic movies in both Britain and America starring the kinds of iconic actors whose names can already leave people from the generation following mine feeling nonplussed, and leave the rest of the room glancing at the ceiling in disbelieving silence. Cary Grant (“Who?”), James Stewart (“Nevvo-erred-ov-im”), Grace Kelly (“You wot?”) and Doris Day (“Are-u-avvin-me-on?”) are already names fading from the general recognition of the public to be replaced with such luminaries as “Beyonce” and “Justin Bieber” or “Vin Diesel” and that bloke from the “Twilight” movies. Such, I suppose is the fleeting fickle finger of fame, and their stars too will inevitably happen to fade to nothing one day, to be replaced by the next wave, whoever they might turn out to be.

Sadly the grand master shuffled off to the great editing room in the sky before the video age really took off in the domestic market, in the days before the idea of VAM (Value Added Material) on viewing platforms was a glint in the glowing red eyes of a marketing specialist, and before even home-viewing itself was really thought of as being a likely and affordable prospect. Back in those days, you used to go to the cinema to watch a movie and, once it had finished its release run, you might very well never have seen it again until that new-fangled television nonsense started buying them up cheap to fill the massive wastelands of airtime. Even then, you had to make the choice to go to the cinema and probably miss forever that TV show you enjoyed watching because that’s the way things were.

When it comes to the dawn of things like “extras” in the video age, I do remember a friend of mine buying a set of 2 videos of “The Usual Suspects” – one that was just the film and a duplicate tape which had what we would now call the Audio Commentary instead of the soundtrack. I seem to remember that I didn’t think it would catch on, but that option was soon overtaken anyway by the coming of the shiny disc and before you know it all sorts of added fun was being attached to your feature film, wonderful “extras” like “animated menus” and “chapter selection”, but things soon sorted themselves into the sorts of stuff we now recognize as being standard today.

This does very little for poor old Mr Hitchcock, of course. He can hardly be resurrected just to share his thoughts upon flinging dead birds at “Tippi” Hedren, although, because he was a master at self-promotion long before it had the name, there is a certain amount of material around that has been salvaged and added to the various releases of his surviving films. I say “surviving” because his career was so very long that it dated back to the earliest days of cinema when such things weren’t preserved with quite the vigour there would be in later years, and some of his early works are, it seems, lost forever.

The reason this all came to mind was because of an interview with Madonna I saw on TV at the weekend. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Hitchcock used to publicise his films by doing interviews on film. The studio would ask questions and he would answer them on film  and (this is the clever bit) local news stations could splice in footage (from the days of its proper meaning of length of film strips, not what Kate Humble refers to home video clips as being…) of their own interviewer asking those questions and, as far as the viewer was concerned, it would look just as if your local “Tom, Dick, Harry or Jeremy” was interviewing the great man in person.

From the structure of the Madonna interview, and the way the reporter was intercut whilst sitting against similar looking wallpaper, but never appearing in a two shot with her, and the way he started every question with “Madonna…” in that way that you really wouldn’t if you were in the same room at the same time, I had my suspicions that this ancient art was being practiced again, and we should, as discerning consumers, remain on the alert for such things.

I remember the old story of the reported being sacked over the chess tournament piece he did because when he was congratulated on the good luck of just happening to find two old men playing chess in front of the tournament venue he admitted that he’d set it up, and given them a chess set so he could film it. He was fired because “You don’t fake the news!” and I think of that every morning when I see the various “spontaneous” tricks and gimmicks employed by the reporters on Breakfast News and which just goes to show how much times have changed.

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…

GENERIC BLOG POSTING NUMBER 238

I very rarely write these pieces “live” as it were, i.e. direct to the blog without being filtered through some other software. Most of these musings and mutterings are composed a few days before I release them into the world to give me a chance to mull over the wisdom of letting anyone read them at all and to let me have an opportunity to rethink them and remove any more radical or terrifying points of view that I might have allowed to seep in. Yes, dear friends, believe it or not, what you get to see here are actually the results of some actual process of thought and elimination. I’m sure you’d never have guessed that in a million years now, would you? As a bit of a pointless game, the more forensically minded amongst you might be able to tell which of the blogs have been written directly online because of the way this website handles its apostrophes, if you really are that bored.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that, strictly speaking, this means that this doesn’t really count as a “blog” in the proper understanding of the concept at all. A “Weblog” for which it is the abbreviation (yes, I know that I’m talking to people who know all this already, but bear with me…) is technically a log of events as they occur, much like a diary, and little here could really be described as being similar in any way to a diary, except for the fact that they represent an unfolding palimpsest of thoughts in the order of which they occurred to me, although, as I have already mentioned, even that isn’t necessarily strictly true either. I have been known to hang on to one or two of them far beyond their ‘use by’ date because other, more immediate, things have popped into my head in the interim or world-shaking events have occurred that I feel a need to react to.

Once or twice I have hung onto one of my notions for far too long and they will suddenly need judicious pruning and reshaping to make them even remotely relevant again. Either that or I’ll just chuck them out, alone and frightened, into the big wide world anyway and see what happens (usually not much…). Interestingly enough, what sometimes seems to be a hopelessly inappropriate or out of date posting, when I’m focussing upon one irrelevance and the world has its mind focussed on something more significant elsewhere, doesn’t seem quite so out of kilter when you just look back on them a month or so later. It’s also true that the ones that I think are a load of old rhubarb are generally the ones that get most read, but I suppose that I should be immune to that particular irony by now. Occasionally it does still feel like I’m writing about the kind of ridiculously over-focussed minutiae that would have inspired a middling episode of “Seinfeld” (although with all the humour removed, naturally…), as I burble out my thoughts on trivia and irrelevances.

I was recently reading about “The Diary of a Victorian Clergyman” which was published in the mid-1920s, the better part of a century after it was written, and I began to wonder whether much the same situation was happening here. Not the posthumous publishing part, obviously. That would be ridiculous. No, the point I’m trying to make is that the forty-odd years which are covered by the diaries apparently go into great detail about pretty much every single thing that the Clergyman actually ate, but completely fail to mention anything much of any significance that was happening in the world around him. It’s a bit like writing your diary for September 11th 2001 and just mentioning that you had tea and toast for breakfast, you skipped lunch and were then disappointed to find out that all your favourite restaurants were closed.

In a similar vein, I do sometimes wonder, although it is highly unlikely that anyone would be likely to be inclined to do so, if you read back through these various rantings and ravings of the last half year or so, what precisely would you learn about what is happening in the real world from them? Sadly, I came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be all that much and you might just get the odd idea that old TV shows are somehow massively important to our culture. Meanwhile, of course, the actual real world is still a sometimes rather bewildering place. With all of this in mind, here are a few things that have been taxing the great minds of the bigger, wider world recently as I sat here writing my usual drivvle.

There were accusations of corruption in the high places of football land, and evidence of torture in care homes for people with learning disabilities, as filmed by an undercover reporter. Both of these news items just had me wondering whether people are ever really made aware any more that some things are just plain wrong and that you don’t do the things you shouldn’t just because you can, you stand back and say “No, I won’t do that because it would be wrong.”

I know, it’s easy to take the old “Untouchables” strategy when it’s not you that is in that position and you don’t really know all the facts, and it’s also terribly easy to take the moral high ground, especially if you have feet of clay like I’m completely aware I do. The footballing thing bewilders me because the whole thing seems to be based around people who are in a well-paid job that millions probably can only dream of being lucky enough to have, but then wanting to get even more out of it. The care home one is a much more tricky situation to come to terms with, because it seems to be born out of frustration more than anything else. Certainly few in that sector are highly paid, but you would hope that we would all want to treat vulnerable people as we would wish to be treated ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, both are really about the abuse of power.

Despite the fact that in this instance it seems to have unveiled a shocking truth and therefore be fully justified, of course any “investigation” that relies upon secret filming is bound to be highly selective, and having been in a few supermarkets on a Saturday morning, I suspect that there are one or two people whose actions with their own children might not appear to be anything other than torture if filmed out of context, so it really is difficult to tell, but we can still only hope that this brings an end to such practices. Sadly, I doubt it. Self-interest and business practices will always trump basic humanity, it seems. Why else would a spokesman for the company suspended from trying to extract Shale Gas because it was possibly causing earthquakes say something along the lines of “It’s only a small earthquake… you’d barely notice it. It would do hardly any damage at all…”

Well, that’s all right then.

Meanwhile, the space shuttle “Endeavour” has returned to Earth from its final mission and will now end its days housed in a museum after all those millions of miles it has flown, hopefully inspiring future scientists to greater things. More down to earth technological developments mean that some people are emailing the BBC to complain about the methods used to sell tickets for the Olympics (in the words of an old “Not the nine o’clock news” sketch “This really has got nothing to do with us…”), and our mobile phones are now definitely, absolutely burning our brains (unless of course, they’re not…).

At the same time, the people of Blackburn are being fined for public swearing (“Two thousand ****ing hells in Blackburn, Lancashire…”) and the fight against cancer seems to have embraced the dubious delights of “Management Speak” as it transforms itself into “Something you can live with rather than something you die from” which has the air of a “Mission Statement” about it and doesn’t much help all those I’ve known who’ve already succumbed to its horrors. Someone far more eloquent than I’ll ever be did recently say “If cancer was a person, I’d want to punch it in the face”, and I think I know what they mean. Maybe that would be a better slogan all round.

“So, what’s all this preamble all about?”, I hear you scream. Well, I did try to watch a rental copy of  “The Hurt Locker” over the weekend, but the disc was a bit faulty and so I got to within 20 minutes of the end and then it became totally unplayable… (Stick with this, there is a point to it… honestly…) Sigh! You do find yourself sometimes wondering what it is that “other people” do to these discs before they return them. The idea of “please leave these things as you would like to find them” just doesn’t seem to work when it comes to film rental it would appear, but you do sometimes wonder whether people are feeding them to their dog or using them as skating rinks for their gerbils or something.

Still, when you’re watching a film like (80% of) “The Hurt Locker”, which basically dramatises the experiences of a bomb disposal squad serving in Iraq, and the day-to-day horrors that many people both in the military and civilian populations are enduring, you do tend to end up with the feeling that those things that annoy you about your job, or having a faulty DVD in your life, isn’t quite such a bad thing to have to deal with if it’s the worst thing you have to put up with today.

LAZY DAYS AND SUNDAYS

Saturday turned out to be a pretty lazy day. Apart from opening the door to bring in the milk bottles and again later on to put out the bin bags, I never put a foot outside the door. Instead, after a couple of pointless hours stringing together my thoughts for nobody to read, I spent an awful lot of the day slouching on the couch catching up with the accumulated recordings of the week, “The Mentalist”, “CSI” and “Law and Order”, and sorting through the mountain of shredding I’ve accumulated since I burned out the old shredder and then watching my new “Doctor Who” DVD (“The Ark” a 1965 story with the legendary Mr. William Hartnell) before spending the evening watching the surprisingly entertaining “Iron Man” (which we recorded weeks ago) and most of the dreary “Batman Begins” until relatively late. I’m not proud of any of this, but, the truth is, that’s my life, that’s what I do, and, to a certain extent with a few obvious variations on content, that’s pretty much what I’ve done with my weekends for decades. What a waste of a life. What a waste of time.

It was the surprisingly rather good (for a post-Grissom one) “CSI” episode – about a compulsive hoarder - that got me attacking the shredding, but the problem is that I’ve had so little home time where I wasn’t either utterly exhausted or emotionally drained for the better part of three months now, that everything’s started falling apart on the domestic front, the structural front and possibly even on the emotional health front. For a while I found that rattling my thoughts out in this place and engaging in a little banter helped to keep my spirits up, but even that has started to fail in the last couple of weeks and I’ve been finding the mental cliff face of recording something approaching rational thought getting steeper and steeper and harder and harder to negotiate. The tiny crumbs of happiness I got from doing even that have been becoming ever more rare and it seems that, in all honesty, I truly feel that I may have nothing much left to give.

Then I saw a couple of adverts on TV yesterday which gave me a “Road to Damascus” moment (or whatever its polar opposite might be) and they made me realise that I lived in a society with which I had nothing much in common and to which I had nothing much to say anyway. Culturally, the bombardment of pointless advertising selling us the dream or the nightmare (delete as applicable) which we weave around the annual international sick bag of “Valentine’s Day” just mentally ripped me to pieces. Look, if you love somebody, just go and tell them so every once in a while. You don’t need to make a ruddy great spectacle of it once a year just because some marketing departments tell you you should. If we all end up needing to be playing to the gallery to get some idea of how special we are, and to let everyone else know how special someone else thinks we are, then nobody’s really all that special at all.  The self-aggrandising, self-indulgent, self-absorbed society we’ve built for ourselves and then choose to publicly show to the world to prove how decadent we’ve become is just horrifying...

[CONTINUING ANGRY RANT DELETED*]

Of course, as another song (almost) goes, “Lazy days and Sundays always get me down…” which is probably why I found myself writing this:

I think the time has come for me to admit that I just don’t do very well with dealing with people. I have tried, I have genuinely tried, but, somehow, I’m just going to have to admit it to myself that I really don’t know how the world works. I see the world going by and I’ve even been known to interact with it on occasion but when it comes to the crunch it really is to no avail. Now I know that anyone who reads this will think I’m - once again - suffering from a bit of wallowing introspection, but I have now realised that there’s much more to it than that. The bigger picture tells me a lot more about the world, my place in it, and how I relate to it, and, frankly, I think I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that apart from a handful of vital people who I’m clinging on to for dear life, I...

[INTROSPECTIVE SELF-INDULGENT RANT DELETED*]

* Deleted Rants will be available in the Box Set of “The Complete Lesser Blogfordshire” which will be available one year as the imperfect Valentine’s Gift from none of your usual outlets I’m sure...

SMALL PARCELS OF ANXIETY

I’m waiting for four parcels at the moment, five if you count one that the beloved has ordered which still hasn’t been delivered, and six if you include another CD order I made yesterday, although that’s not been dispatched yet, so it probably doesn’t count. On some basic level I do look forward to the arrival of Barry the Postie and the soft clatter of the letterbox as another packet is pushed through. Equally, there is also the nagging irritation when something doesn’t actually appear on its estimated delivery date, and that slight trickle of worry that tends to grow and grow as the days without its arrival stretch into a week or more.

Has it been stolen? Has it been delivered to one of the nearby houses which is sometimes empty during the week? Or delivered to the wrong address where perhaps someone dishonest lives? Why do I have to wait a full 28 days before I can inform the supplier that it’s gone missing? If I do report it missing, will it then turn up the very next day and make me look like a neurotic, impatient idiot? Have they chosen to dispatch it with some other, lesser, carrier whose delivery staff sneak up to the front door like ninjas and slip away having left a “missed delivery” card but no actual parcel? Why, oh why does the mail delivery system sometimes seem so random, with some things arriving the very next day after I order them and others hanging around in some mysterious parcel limbo for weeks at a time after I get my dispatch note?

Since Christmas I have ordered stupendous (well, relatively speaking) quantities of cheap tat (mostly books that I “just fancy” reading - hence the house full of books we have), possibly trying in some small way to cheer myself up. I’m told I compensate for my miseries by ordering these kinds of things and that, as we do already have a house full to bursting point with such tat, I really shouldn’t be ordering any more of it, but then I still go off and do so anyway.

I’m weak.

I’m feeble.

I admit it, but then I can’t ever resist a good bargain and I always justify it to my conscience by telling myself that I do wait for the price to drop to what I think that it’s reasonable to pay.

It’s the online sales that normally do for me, that and the fact that I’m suddenly free of the zone. The zone is that period of the year after the beloved has started to buy her gifts for me – be it for birthday or Christmas - until the celebration day itself. During that time I am not allowed to buy myself anything at all – with the odd exception (and the odd pre-order that is due out after the date is also allowed) - for fear of duplication.

I’m also told that all this personal shopping diminishes the value of the gifts I receive, especially if I’m receiving parcels I’ve bought for myself nearly every single week of the year, and this means that I don't get the benefit of the things that I do receive as loving, thoughtful gifts.

Ah! The perils of being a collector… and a completist.

I wonder whether it’s all because I really need something to look forward to, and that momentary feeling of excitement as I rush to the door after Barry’s done his letterbox thing is ever-so-slightly addictive? Or maybe I like to punish myself with a slight disappointment when I go down the stairs only to find that whatever I was expecting is still not lying on the doormat.

“So what is all this tat he’s expecting so eagerly?” I hear you possibly not cry. Well, you’ll probably think it’s a load of old rubbish, but it interests me, which I suppose is the nature of these things. The first I actually ordered quite a bit before Christmas, when I was firmly in the zone and it was therefore a wicked thing to do, although I convinced myself that the title was so obscure that the beloved was unlikely to have ever heard of it. It was a book called Second Thoughts, the second volume of Colin Baker’s – the multi-coloured shouty Dr. Who from the mid-1980s - articles for the Bucks Free Press. Towards the end of last Autumn I’d read his first volume after it was recommended to me, and I really liked it, being as it was a little bit like a blog – a smorgasbord of articles on various topics – but in book form. I didn’t know at the time that there was a second volume, so when I spotted it online my finger only hesitated for a moment before clicking to reflect on my zonal state before ordering, although it has taken rather a long time for the shop I used to get it back into stock, which is why I’m still waiting.

Ah online shopping! Too easy to click. Too easy to spend those pennies when it all seems so very virtual. Too alarming when the credit card bill arrives. I have a friend who doesn’t like online shopping because of the delay involved. They prefer the instant gratification of going into a shop, buying something and having it in their hands and available to them straight away, but I think I prefer the deferment, the thinking time, the pause to reflect and punish myself for my own weakness.

The second expected parcel is The Bogart and Bacall Signature Collection on DVD, the only one of those collections it seems that wasn’t on sale in Sainsbury’s just before Christmas and the only one I really wanted. To be fair, I’ve already got two of the rather brilliant films in this set on disc, Key Largo and The Big Sleep (in fact I only watched The Big Sleep on my “day off” last week) but this seems to be the only way you can get hold of To Have and Have Not on disc in the UK at the moment, and the set was cheap enough for me to justify it, and I get Dark Passage as a kind of bonus, too.

I just love those old Humphrey Bogart films!

Another DVD and an Audiobook make up the third and fourth. Optical media! Don’t you just love it? For me, you can keep your downloads and your “clouds”, I need to hold that physical object in my grubby paw! If it’s too virtual, I fear it might just slip away from me. I’m so old-school, so analogue that it probably hurts your brain just to think about it! I’ve not even considered moving to Blu-ray yet (Another format to fork out for?! Please, no…) and our telly is still reassuringly bulky, has a cathode ray tube somewhere within and is curvy of glass at the screen end, although it isn’t in a wooden cabinet, so I have embraced modernity in some ways. I even watched something from a Videotape last week, but I honestly don’t have any wax cylinders which I keep my audio collection on, although I do still have a sneaking desire to acquire a new turntable to play my old LPs on, even though when Pete Townsend’s White City Album finally made it on to CD, it did rather put a dent in that argument.

Oh, and the beloved awaits another new bag. She has many bags, but I can hardly be critical now, can I?

Not with all the tat I’m expecting.